Essay 4
Minimum of 3 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Choice A
Read Alexandra Sifferlin's "The Weight Loss Trap" and Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence" and develop an argumentative thesis that addresses their claim that losing weight is a nearly futile quest.
Choice B
Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Why I’m Giving Up on Preventative Care” and agree or disagree with her position to quit preventative maintenance.
Choice C
Read Ibram Kendi’s “What’s the Difference Between a Frat and a Gang?” and agree or disagree with the author’s contention that there is a double standard for exacting the law against these groups.
Choice D
Read “What Women Know About the Internet” by Emily Chang and agree or disagree with the author’s contention that regulations are more important than free speech for protecting women.
Choice E
Read the following: “Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner,” “Why Hugh Hefner’s Haters Won’t Let Him Rest in Peace,” “Negative Obituaries Prove Hugh Hefner Was Right,” and 10-minute video Maher vs. Douthat. Then develop an argumentative thesis that addresses this question: Was Hefner a warrior for equal rights, free speech, and higher culture, or was he a selfish, salacious Peter Pan who denigrated women? Or a bit of both?
Choice F
Read Conor Friedersdorf’s “In Defense of Harvey Weinstein’s Harvard Lawyer” and agree or disagree with the contention that representing someone as monstrous and diabolical as Harvey Weinstein performs a civic good.
Choice G
Read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison and write an argumentative thesis that address the contention that it is morally objectionable for white woman Rachel Dolezal to fabricate an identity to pass as being black for several reasons, not the least of which she is appropriating blackness in the manner of a “culture vulture.” How do you address the counterargument that she is simply choosing her racial identity the way one has the right to choose one’s sexual identity? Is the comparison fair? Explain. You can also consult the parody of Rachel Dolezal in the Donald Glover’s Atlanta episode “B.A.N.” in which Paper Boi discusses “trans-racial” issues with Montague. You can also consult Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide.
Option H
Watch The Game Changers on Netflix and develop an argument that either supports the claim that the documentary makes a persuasive case for a plant-based vegan diet or the assertion that the documentary is a work of cheap propaganda.
The Game Changers Criticisms:
One. The producer is an investor in a pea protein factory.
Two. Some of the information is not as scientific as presented.
Three. Some of the vegans haven't adopted veganism long enough to make a credible appraisal of their results.
Four. There is no attention paid to long-term adherence since most people find a vegan diet to be punitive.
Five. They don't acknowledge that on a vegan diet you need to eat more protein than an animal diet because vegan protein doesn't assimilate inside the body as much as animal protein.
November 12. We will see some of the Netflix documentary The Game Changers. We will read Alexandra Sifferlin's "The Weight Loss Trap" and explain why it is so difficult to lose weight and keep it off. We will also read Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence." We will see Netflix Explained on this subject of weight loss. Homework #15: Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Why I’m Giving Up on Preventative Care” and agree or disagree with her position to quit preventative maintenance.
November 14 Go over Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Why I’m Giving Up on Preventative Care” and agree or disagree with her position to quit preventative maintenance. Homework #16 for next class: Read Ibram Kendi’s “What’s the Difference Between a Frat and a Gang?” and agree or disagree with the author’s contention that there is a double standard for exacting the law against these groups.
November 19 Go over Ibram Kendi’s “What’s the Difference Between a Frat and a Gang?” and agree or disagree with the author’s contention that there is a double standard for exacting the law against these groups.
Read “What Women Know About the Internet” by Emily Chang and agree or disagree with the author’s contention that regulations are more important than free speech for protecting women.
Homework #17: Read “Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner,” “Why Hugh Hefner’s Haters Won’t Let Him Rest in Peace,” “Negative Obituaries Prove Hugh Hefner Was Right” and then explain in 200 words why Hugh Hefner is such a controversial figure.
November 21 We will examine the Hugh Hefner debate: Was Hefner a warrior for equal rights, free speech, and culture, or was he a selfish, salacious Peter Pan who denigrated women? Or a bit of both? We will study the following: “Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner,” “Why Hugh Hefner’s Haters Won’t Let Him Rest in Peace,” “Negative Obituaries Prove Hugh Hefner Was Right,” and 10-minute video Maher vs. Douthat.
We will read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison and address the contention that it is morally objectionable for white woman Rachel Dolezal to fabricate an identity to pass as being black for several reasons, not the least of which she is appropriating blackness in the manner of a “culture vulture.” How do you address the counterargument that she is simply choosing her racial identity the way one has the right to choose one’s sexual identity? Is the comparison fair? Explain. You can also consult Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide.
Your homework #18 for next class: Read Conor Friedersdorf’s “In Defense of Harvey Weinstein’s Harvard Lawyer” and agree or disagree with the contention that representing someone as monstrous and diabolical as Harvey Weinstein performs a civic good.
November 26 Go over Conor Friedersdorf’s “In Defense of Harvey Weinstein’s Harvard Lawyer” and agree or disagree with the contention that representing someone as monstrous and diabolical as Harvey Weinstein performs a civic good.
November 28 Holiday
December 3 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write introduction, thesis, and first supporting paragraph.
December 5 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write supporting paragraphs and counterargument-rebuttal paragraph.
December 10 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write conclusion and MLA Works Cited and proofread entire essay.
December 12 Essay 4 due on turnitin. We will grade Portfolio #2, responses 10-18.
"What's the Difference Between a Frat and a Gang?"
One. Why does Kendi compare a frat and a gang?
For one, frats commit enormous degrees of sexual violence. We read:
The fraternity may be as violent as the gang. Collegiate America may be as dangerous for women as urban America. If sexual violence is a violent crime, then the fraternity of today may be committing as many violent crimes as the gang of the 1990s that spooked fearful Americans into tough-on-crime policies. The fraternity may be as frequently violent as the “savage gang MS-13,” as President Donald Trump called it in his State of the Union Address in January to spook fearful Americans into tough immigration policies. But Americans stereotype the gang and fraternity differently and treat them differently and rationalize their violence differently and police them differently. What if Americans looked at them similarly? What if Americans treated them similarly? What if Americans treated their victims similarly?
(For more on this subject of frat sexual violence, watch the documentary The Hunting Ground.)
Fraternity culture has been linked to the problem of sexual assault on college campuses, to recite a recent headline almost word for word. Three different studies found that frat men are three times more likely to rape than non-frat men. “It is reasonable to conclude that fraternities turn men into guys more likely to rape,” wrote the author of one of those studies.
Two. Why are women so much at risk on college campuses?
Because of frats. We read:
A female freshman in college today may be more than two times more likely to be a victim of sexually violent contact than an urbanite was likely to be a victim of a violent crime in the mid-1990s. And, given the decline of violent crime in the intervening years, she may be more than five times more likely to face sexual violence on her campus than an urbanite is to face violence in her community. When “non-contact unwanted sexual experiences” are included, these disparities may be even larger.
Those numbers may be imprecise, or misleading. They may underestimate urban violence (and do not account for forms of “non-contact” urban violence). Sexual violence of all kinds is rampant off campuses, including in urban communities. And this comparison relies on the inexact science of self-reporting. I have been a victim of violent crimes, but never reported them to the police. More than half of the violent crimes from 2006 to 2010 went unreported to law enforcement, according to a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and RTI International. But underreporting may be even worse when it comes to sexual violence on college campuses. One 2000 study from the U.S. Department of Justice found that more than 95 percent of collegiate victims of completed or attempted rapes—let alone other forms of sexual violence—did not report the assaults.
Three. How does the double standard enable frat boys?
Consider this series of contrasts: toughness toward savage gang boys versus softness toward immature frat men. Worries about destroying the lives of drunk 20-year-olds accused of violence versus hardly caring about destroying the lives of high 16-year-olds accused of violence. Attacking gangs wielding the faces of their victims versus attacking and defacing the victims of fraternities. Defending death sentences for violent gang boys versus defending the life of privileged denial for violent frat men.
This double standard is both racist and elitist. After all, the stereotypical gang boy is poor and non-white. The stereotypical frat man is elite and white. And the double standard is sexist, as well. A blinding toxicity of masculinity prevents some Americans from truly caring about the typical victim of sexual assault on college campuses in the way they care about the victim of urban violence. Then again, how many Americans really care about those mourning Latino parents of an MS-13 victim that Trump invited to his State of the Union Address? Or about urban Black teens like ‘90s me who were jumped or killed by gangs? And how many want to lock up, deport, or segregate as many of us as possible so we won’t harm them? Do most Americans think there is something wrong with the poor black gang boy and his non-white family, culture, community, and country that is not wrong with the family, culture, community, and country that produces the elite white frat man?
Gang boys are commonly cast as humanity’s problem; youth of color are demonized as super-predators. But frat boys apparently make stupid mistakes as all humans do; none of them, apparently, are super-preying on women.
This is not an attack on all American male gangs or fraternities, especially those healthy brothers and brotherhoods living in the shadows of the toxicity plaguing communities and campuses. It is an attack on Americans’ wildly disparate perceptions of, and policies towards, gangs and fraternities.
Suggested Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Kendi's essay.
Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis that supports or refutes Kendi's major claim.
Paragraphs 3-5: Supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 6: Counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 7: Conclusion, powerful restatement of your thesis.
.
"What Women Know About the Internet" by Emily Chang
Headings are mine.
Like too many women, I’ve been harassed online. The harasser described in explicit detail how he intended to violate me, though somehow his threats didn’t violate Twitter’s terms of service. Twitter, despite my repeated reports, did nothing.
So I did. I gradually tightened my privacy settings across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. I mostly stopped sharing personal, nonwork-related updates and deleted photos of my children; I haven’t posted new pictures for more than a year.
I’m a tech journalist, so perhaps I am extra-sensitive to the dangers of the internet. But my concerns are widely shared by other women.
Several studies have found that women are more concerned about privacy risks online than men and are more likely to keep their profiles private and delete unwanted contacts. Female Italian college students are less likely to share their political views and relationship status than men and are more concerned about risks posed by other users and third parties. Norwegian women post fewer selfies than Norwegian men.
(In the digital age, privacy, misogyny, online violence, harassment, stalking, and other abuses create the need for new ways of looking at free speech)
In other words, digital privacy is a women’s issue. We just don’t think about it that way, or discuss it that way. Of course, privacy is a concern for everyone, but this is also an issue, like health care, on which women have a particular view. Women know, for example, what consent really means. It’s not scrolling through seemingly endless “terms of service” and then checking a box. Online consent, just as it is with our bodies, should be clear, informed and a requirement for online platforms.
(Internet is a dark alley for women, and they need protection, more than "terms of service.")
These views are shaped by the reality that women experience the internet differently, just as the experience of walking down a dark alley, or even a busy street, is different for women than it is for men. One Pew study found that women are far more likely to be sexually harassed online and describe these interactions as extremely upsetting. The Department of Justice reports that about 75 percent of the victims of stalking and cyberstalking are women. And so women look over our shoulders online, just as we do in real life.
(Internet is designed for men, not women.)
It isn’t just that real-life harassment also shows up online, it’s that the internet isn’t designed for women, even when the majority of users of some popular applications and platforms are women. In fact, some features of digital life have been constructed, intentionally or not, in ways that make women feel less safe.
(Women more vulnerable just bringing in their phone for repair, let alone going online.) (Also see Business Insider.)
For example, you can’t easily use Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service without a phone number, which many women don’t want to share. Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has promised to build encrypted communication into all its platforms. Just as important is giving users the option to make their messages disappear, so that if a hostile ex somehow got into your phone there would be nothing to see.
Even well-meaning efforts at transparency don’t always work that way for women. Lyft’s car pool service shares the registered names of passengers with everyone else in the car. The first name of an incoming passenger flashes in lights across the dashboard, a feature intended to let riders know they are in the right car. A privacy researcher told me that she once jumped into a Lyft shared ride wearing a sweatshirt with her company’s logo. The next day, she received an email from a male passenger saying, “I found you!” Clearly, he had been able to use her first name and the name of her company to track her down online.
(What's cute for someone, might be creepy for others.)
What he may have thought was cute, she thought was creepy. “Do I have any control over this interaction?” the researcher asked. “You want control over the self you’re putting online, just like you want control over your body.” Note to Lyft: Some passengers would be safer if they were anonymous.
(Central Argument)
With Congress considering whether to draft new privacy regulations, it is important that the specific concerns of women be taken into account now, while the rules are being debated.
California’s new privacy law is a case in point: It is a bold piece of legislation, but it falls short for women. In the event of a data breach, for example, consumers in California will have the right to sue if certain kinds of personally identifying information, like Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers, are compromised. But that may not include material like intimate emails or explicit photos. The current iteration of the law is so murky that it’s not clear whether Jennifer Lawrence, the actress whose nude photos were stolen from her iCloud account in 2014 and made public, would have a case against Apple if a similar incident occurred after the law goes into effect next year.
California’s “right to be forgotten” also doesn’t go as far as Europe’s new privacy legislation, the most sweeping data reform in history. Under the California law, consumers have the right to delete information they personally provide to companies. But if someone else — say, an unhappy ex — posted something about me online, I would not be able to get that taken down. Under Europe’s new law, though, I would at least be able to request such a post be removed.
Although women’s groups have defended privacy as it pertains to abortion, they haven’t yet broadly taken up the issue of digital privacy. Among the few to do so publicly is a grass-roots effort called Catalina’s List, a backer of the California law. “Anything that gives big business an upper hand on individual choices is corrupting the idea of personal choice, freedom and privacy,” a co-founder of Catalina’s List, Bobbi Jo Chavarria, told me.
Weaker federal privacy legislation could eventually override the California law. Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft all contributed money to groups opposing the California law, and last year these companies and Apple spent more than $64 million lobbying Congress on privacy and other issues. Tech companies are pushing for what they want; as the research shows, that’s not necessarily what women want.
(More women need to be in power.)
So what can Americans do? First, we must elect more women to positions of power who can help write privacy legislation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the top digital policymakers in Europe are women, including Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s competition commissioner, and Elizabeth Denham, Britain’s information commissioner.
The law, of course, will never be as fast as tech companies. They should build products and services that respect privacy by design. To do that, these companies need to hire and consult more women. Women hold just 25 percent of jobs across the tech industry and an even smaller percentage of prime engineering roles.
Most important, all of us must start thinking about privacy as a feminist issue. We cannot wait for women’s concerns to be addressed. The stakes for us are far too high.
Emily Chang (@emilychangtv) is an anchor at Bloomberg TV and the author of “Brotopia.”
Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Chang's major points.
Paragraph 2: Support or refute Chang's thesis.
Paragraphs 3-5: Supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 6: Counterargument-rebuttal (free speech argument).
Paragraph 7: Conclusion, restatement of your thesis.
Choice E
Read the following: “Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner,” “Why Hugh Hefner’s Haters Won’t Let Him Rest in Peace,” “Negative Obituaries Prove Hugh Hefner Was Right,” and 10-minute video Maher vs. Douthat. Then develop an argumentative thesis that addresses this question: Was Hefner a warrior for equal rights, free speech, and higher culture, or was he a selfish, salacious Peter Pan who denigrated women? Or a bit of both?
"Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner" by Ross Douthat
Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.
Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with Quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.
The arc of his life vindicated his moral critics, conservative and feminist: What began with talk of jazz and Picasso and other signifiers of good taste ended in a sleazy decrepitude that would have been pitiable if it wasn’t still so exploitative.
Early Hef had a pipe and suit and a highbrow reference for every occasion; he even claimed to have a philosophy, that final refuge of the scoundrel. But late Hef was a lecherous, low-brow Peter Pan, playing at perpetual boyhood — ice cream for breakfast, pajamas all day — while bodyguards shooed male celebrities away from his paid harem and the skull grinned beneath his papery skin.
This late phase was prettied up by reality television’s “The Girls Next Door,” which kept the orgies offstage and relied on the girlfriends’ mix of desperation, boredom and charisma for its strange appeal. The behind-the-scenes accounts were rather grimmer: depression and drugs, “dirty hallway carpets and the curtains that smell like dog piss,” the chance to wait while Hef “picked the dog poo off the carpet — and then ask for our allowance.”
Needless to say the obituaries for Hefner, even if they acknowledge the seaminess, have been full of encomia for his great deeds: Hef the vanquisher of puritanism, Hef the political progressive, Hef the great businessman and all the rest. There are even conservative appreciations, arguing that for all his faults Hef was an entrepreneur who appreciated the finer things in life and celebrated la différence.
What a lot of garbage. Sure, Hefner supported some good causes and published some good writers. But his good deeds and aesthetic aspirations were ultimately incidental to his legacy — a gloss over his flesh-peddling, smeared like Vaseline on a pornographer’s lens. The things that were distinctively Hefnerian, that made him influential and important, were all rotten, and to the extent they were part of stories that people tend to celebrate, they showed the rot in larger things as well.
His success as a businessman showed the rotten side of capitalism — the side that exploits appetites for money, that feeds leech-like on our vices, that dissolves family and religion while promising that consumption will fill the void they leave behind.
The social liberalism he championed was the rotten and self-interested sort, a liberalism of male and upper-class privilege, in which the strong and beautiful and rich take their pleasure at the expense of the vulnerable and poor and not-yet-born.
The online future his career anticipated was the rotten side of the internet — the realms of onanism and custom-tailored erotica, where the male vanity and entitlement he indulged has curdled into resentment and misogyny.
And his appreciation of male-female difference was rotten, too — the leering predatory sort of appreciation, the Cosby-Clinton-Trump sort, the sort that nicknames quaaludes “thigh openers” and expects the girls to laugh, the sort that prefers breast implants to female intellect and rents the charms of youth to escape the realities of age.
No doubt what Hefner offered America somebody else would have offered in his place, and the changes he helped hasten would have come rushing in without him.
But in every way that mattered he made those changes worse, our culture coarser and crueler and more sterile than liberalism or feminism or freedom of speech required. And in every way that mattered his life story proved that we were wrong to listen to him, because at the end of the long slide lay only a degraded, priapic senility, or the desperate gaiety of Prince Prospero’s court with the Red Death at the door.
Now that death has taken him, we should examine our own sins. Liberals should ask why their crusade for freedom and equality found itself with such a captain, and what his legacy says about their cause. Conservatives should ask how their crusade for faith and family and community ended up so Hefnerian itself — with a conservative news network that seems to have been run on Playboy Mansion principles and a conservative party that just elected a playboy as our president.
You can find these questions being asked, but they are counterpoints and minor themes. That this should be the case, that only prudish Christians and spoilsport feminists are willing to say that the man was obviously wicked and destructive, is itself a reminder that the rot Hugh Hefner spread goes very, very deep.
Example of Nuanced Response from Reader Comments Section:
I guess it's part and parcel of our current cultural polarization that one is expected to come down as pro or con with reference to Hefner. I refuse to do so. I appreciated Hef's breaking of sexually repressive attitudes, as well as his promotion of writers and topics that failed to find publication elsewhere, and his contributions to many valuable cultural projects, such as his support for film preservation. But none of that means I would endorse his objectification and stereotyping of women as sex objects, or look favorably upon his personal fetishism for women so much younger that himself. He was a kid in a candy store who moved in and never moved out, and I'm sure he left a lot of damaged people in his wake. The Playboy mansion was likely a den of cocaine and HIV dissemination in its day. So I am content to look at all of it - the good, the bad and the ugly - and acknowledge Hefner as a flawed person who had a powerful influence on his culture, both for better and for worse. Doesn't that sound like a lot of famous people that we've lost?
Reader Who Finds Hefner on Balance to be Evil Force
Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’m a Baby Boomer who had to endure the influence of Hefner. Even though many of us have grown up and out of this oppressive period, I prefer the company of Millenials. The men and the women of this generation are appalled by Trump and Trumpians (Hefner supporters). That suits me. One of my high school classmates grew up in foster care. She was a pretty girl, average student. She disappeared for several months and then was back at school. Unbeknownst to me, she was pregnant and relinquished her baby for adoption. After high school she modeled for Hefner’s Playmate of the Month. Hefner exploited this woman’s troubled psyche and made millions off of others. Celebrating Hefner’s life is just plain creepy.
Political Opponent of Douthat Who Agrees with His Hefner Assessment
I am neither a prudish Christian or a spoilsport feminist, but a garden-variety progressive who never thought he would agree with anything written by Ross Douthat. Yet, here I am. No amount of mockery for Douthat's religiosity, or his conservative political and economic delusions, or his sometimes overblown language can rehabilitate Hugh Hefner. That anyone, at this late date, would defend the man who did his best to put a respectable visage on pornography, misogyny, and the exploitation of women is curious, indeed.
Suggested Outline:
Paragraph 1: Frame the debate by showing why people either elevate or scorn Hefner.
Paragraph 2: Make a claim that agrees, disagrees, or complicates Douthat's judgment.
Paragraphs 3-5: Supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 6: Counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 7: Conclusion, powerful restatement of your thesis.
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