Class Entry

This week in class, we continued our “body unit”, which meant more entertaining and educational discussions on the readings. The readings ranged from “Not All Men are Sly Foxes” and “Why I Stopped Being a Vegetarian” to “Drugs” and “Pornoviolence” and they covered a broad range of topics from legalizing drugs to retrieving the golden ball. Gore Vidal’s essay on drugs was strong and firm in its argument. Vidal believes that the only way to stop America’s drug addiction is to make drugs legal and readily available. He suggests labeling each drug with a description of the effects so that the buyer will know exactly what will happen when they do the drugs. I think it is fair to say that there is an extremely slim chance that the United States government will legalize drugs. Our government in this day and age is too busy spending billions of dollars on war and healthcare to worry about a drug problem. I do agree that there is a big drug problem in the United States but I also think that there is no solution to his problem. Vidal says that legalizing drugs will people not want to do them but I think the opposite. People will still do drugs no matter if they are legal or not. I personally am not a fan of drugs but I know that a lot of kids my age are. I see how drugs affect a person’s life and state of mind and I realize how out-of-control the problem is. Just last week at school, a couple of kids got caught with drugs and I know that they were just the beginning of the problem. People know that drugs are illegal and carry bad effects but that doesn’t stop them.

In his essay “Not All Men Are Sly Foxes”, Armin Brott says children’s books are not helping when it comes to the belief that men and women are not equal when it comes to child care. He analyzes numerous children’s books to explain that the Sly Fox is much more common that the Caring Dad. In most children’s book these days, women are portrayed as the primary caregiver and fathers, if present at all, are portrayed as workaholics. He gives the example of Mother Goose and the Sly Fox in which the Mother Goose works as a successful entrepreneur and takes care of her seven children while the sly Fox is a neglectful single father. After I read this essay I thought about the books I read as a child and I realized that there is rarely a father figure present. When there is a father figure present, they are portrayed differently as the mother figure and the authors make it seem like the father is less important and less of a caregiver. When children read these stories they question where the daddy is and they start to think that their daddy is not as good as their mommy. We all know that children will believe whatever they read or hear so why should literature downgrade the importance of a father?