Memes and Whatnot

I was bothered by a factual inconsistency of the piece Our Barbies, Ourselves  and decided to research a bit about it. FThere is such a gross error in what Prager says about who designed Barbie. According to her, "Barbie was designed by a man." That's just factually incorrect. Barbie was based on the design of a German doll known as Bild Lilli. Picture for reference: Here you can see the resemblance, in terms of proportions to Barbie. Want to take a guess who introduced the idea of replicating this doll? It was actually a female - Ruth Handler, who at the time was an executive at Mattel. A bit of backstory, before she laid eyes on this doll, she was trying to develop a doll that had "an adult body" (Ruth Handler's Wiki Page). Her husband actually suggested that the doll was too "voluptuous." Her family had vacationed to Europe where she brought home the Bild Lilli doll, which was in fact "not a children's toy, but rather an adult gag ...

I found it to be extremely fitting that the essay that we had to analyze last Monday was about scientists and the research that they conduct, considering we have a real life example to compare it to: the Coronavirus (2019-nCoV). For a bit of background information, the 2019-nCoV originated from Wuhan, China, and as the name suggests, from 2019 - December of 2019 to be more precise. nCoV type viruses have actually been around for a long time infecting animals. The two most well known cases of other nCoV viruses are MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) which originated from camels and cats respectively. This strain of the Coronavirus is thought to have originated from snakes, and this virus is most closely related the SARS. The jobs of scientists during this time is extremely critical as the 2019-nCoV virus is relatively contagious. "Some viruses are highly contagious (like measles), while other viruses are less so. At this time, it’...

Quite frankly, I hate this essay. I think some of the points that Tannen brings up are completely invalid and offer no real purpose in her essay. It's fair to say that one can characterize Tannen as being a feminist, and by definition a feminist is someone who advocates women's rights on the basis of equality of the sexes What we see however, are points made by her that support the stance that women are inherently better than men. The biggest perpetrator of this is her biological argument. In my opinion, a biological argument has no place in a social commentary. She pulls from Fasold who says language and culture are particularly unfair in treating women as the marked case because biologically is the male that is marked I agree with the fact that it is unfair that women are deemed to be the marked members of society, however the basis on which Fasold pulls this conclusion is completely baseless. Why should it matter that it is men who are marked biologically? This essay ...