The Wanderer
Online Literary Magazine
January 2016
An Introduction
Serving Sizes, Gender Roles, and Other Things That Don't Make Sense
Submitted by-Destiny Cook
Have you ever been eating a bag of chips and then realized you’ve gotten to the bottom? That’s certainly not the serving size. You look to the nutrition facts label and the serving size reads about ten chips. What kind of person can only eat ten chips?! It’s absolutely outrageous and it isn’t the only thing. Society dictates what people (because of their gender) can and cannot do. Gender roles are another thing that is completely ridiculous. Society is full of nonsensical things such as these two and many others. In this essay, we will examine these and others such as relationship definitions, the stigma against mental illness, standards of beauty, and discrimination.
Serving Sizes
Serving sizes are meant to be a recommended portion of a certain food to eat. Most people don’t follow them, so they seem kind of pointless. There is a health benefit to only eating the recommended amount because you can count exactly how much of each nutrient you have just eaten. I just don’t understand why the usual serving size is so unrealistic.
Picture this, you’ve just gotten home from school and you want a snack. You head to the pantry and grab your favorite after school treat: Oreos. You sit down to do homework and begin to eat the scrumptious cookies. Before you know it, you’ve eaten half of the entire package! One serving of Oreos is merely three cookies. You sit in shame as you realize that you’ve eaten six servings of the delicious cookies. Small serving sizes only make people feel bad about themselves.
Large corporations use small serving sizes as a way to make their product seem more healthy. In a way, this could be seen as false advertising. Most Americans don’t even read the nutrition facts label, but the ones who do seem to miss the serving size portion of it. As of 2015, over one-third of American adults are obese. Could this be due to misleading nutrition fact labels? The facts are there, but does anyone choose to look at them?
Gender Roles
Society loves to put labels on people. Gender is a human construct of labels given to people based on how the world perceives them. Gender roles are traditional norms of behavior given to a person based on their gender. Women are often seen as traditionally submissive and nurturing, while men are given the labels dominant and aggressive. Also the “man of the house” is seen as the breadwinner of the family. The woman can usually be found in the kitchen or taking care of the children as a stay at home mom based on society’s expectations. There are many reasons why this makes absolutely no sense.
Society often likes to focus on the extremes of things. In reality, men and women are not all that different. According to a study done by psychology professor Zlatan Krizan, the two genders at hand are much more similar than most people think. There was an “80% overlap for more than 75% of the psychological characteristics.” (Iowa State University News, 2015) I understand that in the past women were the homemakers and men were the breadwinners but a lot has changed since then. Sometimes tradition just has to go and make way for the future.
Relationship Definitions
When I say relationship definitions I mean the classic conversation you have with your friend about someone you’ve taken an interest in. You two talk a ton and your friend is beginning to wonder if you guys are a “thing” or not. There is no reason someone should have to define their relationship before they are completely ready. Just because you take someone on a date you do not have a right to call them your significant other. If a friend is in a relationship it is none of your business to ask about the stage of their relationship. At the bottom line, relationship definitions are pretty useless.
In fact, they can cause relationships to end prematurely. If one person feels they are being rushed into a stage of the relationship they don’t want to be in that relationship can end fairly quickly. If defining a relationship wasn’t so important in modern society I believe that many relations would’ve lasted a much longer time. There are plenty of people who are uncomfortable with the commitment that comes with being in a relationship, so before you ask about it try and think about how they will feel.
The Stigma Against Mental Illness
Those with mental illnesses are not that different from everybody else, but many people seem to think that’s not true. There are many negative stereotypes out there about people who suffer from mental health issues. As someone who knows what mental illness can do to people, I can tell you that the stigma only makes it worse. It often leads to social isolation and breaks in the road to recovery. This is completely absurd and the stigma needs to be cleared up fairly soon.
According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, the definition of stigma is a set of negative and often unfair beliefs that a society or group of people have about something. The stigma of mental illness is mostly caused by stereotypes and negative attitudes toward people who need help. Often, the stigma can cause people to avoid getting treatment for their illness. This only compounds the problem. The stigma is even codified into law! Medicaid limits the number of days a person with a mental illness can receive inpatient psychiatric care (USAtoday, 2015.) The stigma of mental illness is one of the biggest barriers sufferers must overcome.
People often ignore mental illness because they don’t believe it is a real issue. Physical injuries get cared for but ones that are invisible to most people often go untreated. A student with anxiety may be told to suck it up by a teacher who has never experienced a panic attack before. A person with depression could be told to “just cheer up” by someone who has never been witness to their mental breakdowns. A sufferer of insomnia may be told to get more sleep by a person who has never had a sleepless night in her life. This is reality and it is very heartbreaking for many people who deal with it every day.
Standards of Beauty
People often say that looks don’t matter, but apparently they do. The media is full of skinny women with perfect skin and buff guys with a chiseled jaw, but this is not what the average person looks like. Standards of beauty are standards that are set by the media on what is attractive. They can even be found in children’s toys such as Barbie. These ideals can be harmful to young children whose minds are still malleable. They can also reinforce traditional gender roles such as how only girls are portrayed wearing makeup and how no guys are ever seen in dresses. Also, eating disorders are caused by people not being happy with the way they look because all they’ve been shown are slim people. All around, these standards of beauty are harmful.
Race is also affected by the standards of beauty we hold. Lighter skin is often seen as more beautiful. Straight or wavy hair is seen as more desirable. These are not common characteristics for races outside of caucasian. This can harm many people’s self-esteem and happiness. The standards of beauty are often contradictory. Larger women are told to slim down, but skinnier women are commonly told that they need curves in order to look more “womanly.” Also, don’t forget to put on makeup, but not too much because then you’re trying too hard.
Photoshop is used to correct mistakes on celebrities who don’t fit the mold. Women’s skin tones are lightened and evened out. Bodies are morphed into small phantoms of what the human body should be. Cellulite and stretch marks are removed as if they were blemishes on a perfect portrait. Fly-away hairs are deleted almost as if there were no such thing as frizz. When will society realize that you are you for a reason and that who you are is beautiful no matter how you look?
Discrimination
Discrimination is defined as an unjust treatment of a certain group of people, whether it be due to race, age, sex, or sexual orientation. It is truly the heart of all of these issues. Society forces people into categories and the different groups aren’t always friendly with each other. There is homophobia, transphobia, racism, gender discrimination, and the mental illness stigma. They are all related in the same way. Even the serving size issue can be related back to discrimination. We all know that treating someone differently because of the way they look or who they are isn’t right, so why do we still do it?
Our prejudices are often rooted deeply in our minds because of the way we were raised, the environment we grew up in, or an experience we’ve had. It takes time and effort to get rid of a bias, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. All people should be treated equally. We are all flesh and bone. We all deserve love, care, and kindness. How much pain will it take for society to realize all the harm it has caused?
In the end, these things can’t be fixed in one year, five years, maybe not even ten years. Society will always have it’s issues and there isn’t much we can do, unless we work together. In order to remove all of the nonsensical things society has left us with, we must first help ourselves. Remove your personal biases, defy gender norms, refuse to let someone keep you from doing what is right, don’t let anyone question your choices, and always have that extra cookie.
The Wastefulness of the Waste System
Submitted by-Harrison Moore
Waste Disposal is the way that garbage (waste) is gotten rid of. However, nothing is really ever gotten rid of; it all goes somewhere. In the United States, waste is taken to landfills where it stays until that landfill is full. Not only is this system greatly flawed, but it is extremely wasteful. There are ways that these issues could be easily fixed, but most people don’t know enough about the topic to fix it. The fact that so many people take this topic lightly is astounding, especially considering that this is one of the most important factors in the steady decline of the state of the earth. One of the worst solutions people have come up with is to dump excess garbage in the ocean; the trash will either wash back up onto the shore or kill tens, hundreds or even thousands of millions of ocean creatures. What we need are real solutions, and they’re out there. We just need to reach out and grab them.
To someone who has never researched the topic, it seems simple: we throw our trash in our trash can, then a truck comes and picks it up, and that sums up about all we know about the system. Do most of us even know where it goes after it leaves the truck? I do. It goes to a landfill where it will sit and rot for the next decade. Eventually the landfill will get full, and when that happens we cover it up with dirt and pretend it was never there in the first place. This is a very flawed system with many obvious improvements that could be made to it.
While it might seem like a corny tie-in, one of the best examples of extreme, unnecessary waste is in the story of the Atari landfill. Long story short, Atari was hired to make a game for the upcoming film, E.T. Atari thought that this game would sell like hotcakes, if only for the reason that the movie would sell the game, so they decided it would be a good idea to produce over 4 million cartridges. Needless to say, the sales numbers did not match what was expected. Atari was stuck with millions of unsold copies of a game no one wanted. What would you do in this situation? Probably not bury all the games in some random desert landfill in New Mexico. Oh wait, did I say probably not? Because that is exactly what Atari did. About a million copies of E.T and various other games were thrown into a landfill, steamrolled, and covered with sand. Say you have 1,000,000 plastic rectangles, roughly the size of a Samsung Note 4, except thicker. Imagine how much plastic that is! To just dump them in a desert is a complete waste. That plastic could have been recycled.
It’s things like this that show just how much better our waste disposal system could be. The current way in which landfills are done could be much better. One of the simplest solutions, which people have already been doing for quite a while, is to recycle plastic and metal instead of throwing them in the garbage. I find myself guilty of this sometimes too; I finish a can of soda and just throw it into the trash can out of habit. The same thing goes for plastic waste. In 2009, Americans recycled 34% of all waste. We could better benefit the waste disposal system by raising that number even higher!
One of the horrible side effects of these bad waste disposal systems is water pollution. Over 100,000 marine animals die every year just from plastic waste alone! This garbage in the sea then washes up on shore where it also pollutes beaches and the life on them, one example being albatrosses. One-third of all albatross chicks die when their parents feed them small plastic pieces they’ve accidentally collected while hunting for fish. The tiny chicks die of lead poisoning and starvation--all because their bellies are full of toxins and plastic they can’t digest. All this loss of life happens simply because we can’t properly get rid of the things we create.
In conclusion, waste disposal is a very flawed system. While on the surface the problems it creates may seem insignificant, the long-term repercussions of these flaws go much deeper. I’ll say it again - The solutions are out there, we just need to go find them.
Are Humans Essentially Good or Evil at Heart?
Submitted by Alexia Woodward
Humans aren’t born inherently good or evil, but rather, they possess certain qualities that may ‘lean on the fence’. The combination of societal pressures and enculturation can manipulate those qualities to fall on one side of the good vs. evil argument. The following quote helps emphasize that point: “People's character is their behaviour - we're all capable of good and evil,” (Bertie Carvel).
As seen in the quote, humans have the capacity of hatred and the ability to become evil, but that is a chosen trait. Humans are capable of reason and we possess free will, therefore, we choose to hate, and we choose to act evilly towards others. A study by ‘The Infant Cognition Center’ at Yale University concluded that children as young as 3 months old have a sense of justice and morality. That study also tested whether these young children had biases; it concluded that children even approved of the mistreatment of those who differ from them. These children used justice, a ‘good’ trait, in an evil way.
The good vs. evil opposition is also found on pages 10 & 11 of ‘The Most Dangerous Game’. Rainsford voices that hunting humans is murder, but Zaroff replied by comparing hunting humans to his “experiences in war.” Like the children, Rainsford had a good sense of morality, but it didn’t extend to all areas of his life. If humans grow up in an environment where one idea is prominently viewed as correct, it will affect their opinion on that matter, hence a bias. Where does this leave us? This shows that those ‘good’ qualities such as justice, can be shoved just as easily over the fence onto the ‘evil’ side. In conclusion, humans have qualities that can lead to an evil or good effect, but it is ultimately up to us to choose which side of the fence to fall on.