With this topic come a lot of different feelings and emotions from everyone. Are women better for the workforce and politics specifically? Well, according to studies, yes! This work shows a recent study that has proven that women can be more efficient in a group. They have a better “collective intelligence” than a group of men do. This comes about because of the fact that women are more cooperative in problem solving whereas men are more likely to be stubborn and not budge on their side of an issue. So, why don’t we have more women in congress? Well, I don’t know exactly why. People need to be subjected to this news and these findings so that they will vote for more women. Now, there is the topic of making a law for a necessary amount of women in congress. This could potentially prove fatal. If we put people into congress that aren’t qualified to be there, the collective intelligence of the group will get much lower because they aren’t as educated or aware of the surroundings. It is important that we get more women in congress, but we need to be weary of a minimum requirement that could cause people who don’t deserve the job to get it over some other people who do deserve it. I’m not saying that women are not as intelligent as men by any means. I’m just trying to say that we should be careful in anything that deals with politics.

It has been known for ages that crying can help you get what you want. When you are a little kid and you get yelled at you cry to get them to stop yelling. It gets sympathy from others and helps get them to support you when you get their emotions drawn into the mix. John Boehner is a politician around the same age as my dad. My dad will cry at almost anything. If there is a single sad part in any movie he will cry. I feel like John might be the same way. It’s a way to let out emotion that builds up. Now, John Boehner is also a politician. Politicians often lie. I’m not saying that John is a lier, but it is possible that he is letting his emotions flow freely. This can cause people to be sympathetic and supportive.

I don’t fully understand why we take peoples’ body image into account when they are running for a spot in government office. Quite honestly I would rather that a person agreed with me on specific issues than have them look pleasing. If we let our judgement be altered by the looks of a person then we could end up in a very sticky issue down the road. Even though the study in this reading shows a difference for bigger men and thinner women, it was a very small difference in consideration. There was only a 10 percent difference between the largest and smallest values. When considering four different politicians that is quite manageable. But if this trend gets more severe, we could be facing some very severe issues in the future.

There are so many women, my girlfriend included, who suffer from a lack of self esteem. This is largely due to the hollywood image of the perfect woman. Women are shown supermodels all the time on TV and they are expected to have similar bodies. What people don’t understand is the amount of torture and pain that these women go through! They are expected to be under a certain weight, which may not be a healthy weight for most people! This article talks about how women are subjected to having the “ideal” body. And it’s not just movies that are body image dominated cultures. Music and sports are the same way! I can name at least ten artists that aren’t very good singers but they are drop dead gorgeous. With today’s technology it is easy to make them sound good so they have a leg up because of their personal appearance. It isn’t right and it causes women everywhere to be less self confident and to look down upon themselves even if they are completely healthy.

I was really surprised to find out that aerobics was first made for men. I have always thought that aerobics was originally designed for women because in my lifetime it has always been something designed for women. I remember the videos that my mom used to have of that guy Steve doing aerobics and he had like 20 women doing the workouts with him leading it. I felt that the way they attacked this topic was very weak. They say that aerobics is looked upon as something for women to be more sexually appealing but in reality that is a good thing. The same things are designed for men. When you see a boflex commercial on TV, they show guys with huge muscles and perfect abs. That definitely makes me want to look better! It isn’t derogatory to design something for people to look better. Especially when the same thing is tailored toward men.

This article talks about how workout magazines are typically for men. Sports magazines are aimed to interest them. Anything in these magazines that involve women are specifically labeled as such. I think that people make too big a deal about this however. There are so many magazines that are tailored toward women. Magazines such as Sports Illustrated are tailored toward men while Cosmopolitan is aimed at an audience of women and teens. There are reasons that the audiences for these magazines are gender specific. Most women aren’t interested in sports enough to read a magazine about it. Just like most men don’t care about women’s sexuality enough to read Cosmopolitan. People need to be less critical about gender labeling.

This essay covered the topic of female sports writers and sports casters. One woman in particular was Winifred Black. She was the first woman in sports reporting and she attended boxing matches. The essay called to attention the way that she interviewed boxers and the types of questions that she asked them. When she interviewed them, she asked questions about how they feel during competition instead of about their approach to the fight or about their tactics during the fight. It also connected her to the way that women in sports were rising and how the sports world was changing.

There were some very interesting topics that were discussed in this article. I was fascinated to learn that there were so few women broadcasters. I never thought about it, but the sports shows that are shown can definitely paint a negative image of women and minorities for young, immature viewers. I got to thinking and every Lysol commercial that I’ve seen is shown with a woman doing housework. However, I don’t think that it is meant to do so.

There are also points that were made that I found completely irrelevant. As far as professional wrestling commentary using wording such as violent and aggressive, that is what pro-wrestling is! In the sport of football, the game is designed to be played physically and aggressively. When broadcasters support athletes for making a good, strong, aggressive play it shouldn’t be looked upon as a negative. I don’t think that these paint an aggressive or sexist viewpoint for younger audiences.

This article contained some very good points. How do we consider athletes different than any other person? I remember when my former geography and government/economics teacher got word that his wife was headed to the hospital because her water broke. He went running out of the classroom and out the door to his car and sped off. I thought that it was great that he was so anxious to be there for his wife and the birth of his child. But when Romo did the exact same thing, people ridiculed him simply because his team was in the playoffs. I personally find this to be ridiculous. I can’t believe that anyone would think that it was more important for someone to be at his job than to bear witness to the birth of his child. People need to understand that there are some things that are more important in life than sports! Being a father and husband are far more important than being a talented athlete and being there for your team.

Reading this story, along with a few other discussions in both this class and my spanish course have been fairly upsetting. I have come to realize that in nearly every expert’s opinion, women are discriminated against. Frankly, I disagree. When the author makes the point of there being so many derogatory names directed towards women, he explicitly leaves out all of the derogatory names that exist for men (e.g. bastard, ass hole, douche bag, etc…). It is extremely upsetting that no one seems to realize that people are just as derogatory towards men as they are towards women. As for the point made of the NCAA tournament being marked as the “women’s” tournament, this is completely false now. As we read in a previous assignment, broadcasters explicitly avoid marking it as such. And that was in 2002. A full decade ago! Now a days, there is far less marking of names than in the late 20th century. This subtle contradiction is angering and makes me question the reliability of this work. Maybe it’s time for us to conduct some new studies and come up with new results. Maybe, instead of focusing on what the traditional viewpoints of the past have been, we need to work together as a society, not man and woman, to move forward. If people stopped complaining about how women have been treated in the past and just open their eyes for a moment they could see that the world has changed!