Cut, Crop, Create A Lie

For years, Adobe Photoshop has allowed for imperfect pictures to become miraculous perfections. Unfortunately, it’s no longer used to just enhance pictures, but to completely manipulate photos as a way to entice us (consumers) to buy products so that we can look a certain way; the way they want us to look.

With the media portraying the average American woman as 5’11” and 117 pounds, when in reality the average American woman is 5’4” and 140 pounds, it’s no wonder our nation has turned to eating disorders (8 million people to be exact) as a direction correlation of their negative body image.

It has been said that on a typical day we are bombarded with 400 to 600 ads from magazines, billboards, television commercials, and newspapers, all telling us how we need to look or what we can do to look that way. One study showed that 68% of a sample of Stanford undergraduate and graduate students felt worse about their appearance after looking through women’s magazines. Well, why wouldn’t these women feel worse? They are comparing themselves to pictures of men and women that have been altered to show that person with cropped legs to make them appear slimmer, airbrushed muscles to make them look more defined, and retouched skin to make it seem flawless. The media is trying to make us live up to unrealistic ideals. And sadly, we fall for it.

The weight loss industry makes over $55.4 billion of revenue per year because of the falsified ads the media has created. It’s no wonder they want you to think you’re fat and that you need to lose weight, they get your money for telling you that. However, the ideal thinness that is given to us by the media is achieved by less than 5% of the female population. Why are we letting them control us?

It’s time for people to take a stand. We are all beautiful in our own way. I once read a quote by Andy Warhol stating, “If everybody’s not a beauty, then nobody is.” I believe in this quote whole-heartedly.  We need to realize that we each have our own characteristics, abilities, likes and dislikes, which make us unique and beautiful in our own way. We need to stop living up to someone else’s idea of unrealistic beauty and start seeing the beauty we all have.

Sources:

www.youre-beautiful.weebly.com

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24Xa1Nw8eJY&feature=related

Hershey's Chocolate

The Ivory Coast, a West African Country also known as Cote d’Ivoire, grows 70% of the world’s cocoa. The ones who harvest the cocoa beans are typically young boys from the ages of 12 to 16 who have been sold into slave labor and forced to work on the cocoa farms in order to harvest the beans, from which chocolate is made. These boys work in inhumane conditions and extreme abuse.

There are about 600,000 cocoa farms in Cote d’Ivoire with as high as 15,000 children who are forced to work as slaves on the farms. A UNICEF study reports that 200,000 children are trafficked yearly in West and Central Africa. The two countries that are especially implicated in child trafficking in the cocoa trade are Cote d’Ivoire, which is the receiving country, and Mali, which serves as the supplier. The saddest part of this is that the cocoa these children are being forced and beaten to harvest will ultimately end up producing something that most people associate with happiness and pleasure: chocolate.

Although for years these circumstances have been abundant, only recently have people started to advocate for change in Cote d’Ivoire. Fair Trade Towns USA is an organization that promotes better working conditions for cocoa bean farmers and advocates the slave of fair trade products. In fact, a fair trade group in Los Angeles County collected about 100,000 signatures on a petition to get Hershey’s (the leading chocolate producer in the U.S.) to buy cocoa from cooperatives and farms who pay decent wages to their workers and forbid any child labor.

Hershey’s listened to the voice of the people. Hershey’s announced that it will release a new version of Hershey’s Bliss brand that will be 100% made from Rain Forest Alliance-certified farms mostly in Ivory Coast and Ghana. Hershey’s also pledged $10 million to educate West African cocoa farmers on improving their trade and combating child labor.

This is just one step closer to end slavery in the Ivory Coast.



Sources:

http://sojo.net/blogs/2012/02/06/hersheys-fair-trade-announcement-bliss

http://www1.american.edu/ted/chocolate-slave.htm

http://www.whittierdailynews.com/news/ci_19957200

Child Pornography

In 1996, Congress passed the Child Pornography Prevention Act (“CPPA”) to provide a broader protection against sexual exploitation of children. This act prohibited “any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image or picture” that “is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct…” In short, it prohibited pornographic images in which the actors could be taken for minors, as well as computer-generated or virtual child pornography.

Many people had averse views of the CPPA, and the Supreme Court foresaw the CPPA capturing a substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech. The court had an issue against the banning of material that merely “conveys the impression” that it contains depictions of children, whether or not it actually consisted of child pornography. The Court also disagreed with the CPPA when it came to real versus virtual child porn.

Many people disagreed with the Courts opinion saying that virtual child pornography encourages the sexual appetite of pedophiles, hence prompting abuse of real children. They also said that virtual child pornography could be used to groom children for abuse if a pedophile showed virtual depictions of naked children adult-child sex to potential victims in order to lower the child’s inhibitions.

On the contrary, many also supported the Courts decision saying that if we restrict virtual child porn that could “encourage pedophiles”, we would also have to take other measures such as stopping the school systems from reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet because it could encourage young adults to commit suicide.

Which argument do you support? 

Source: http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv3/groups/public/@nyu_law_website__journals__review_of_law_and_social_change/documents/documents/ecm_pro_063994.pdf

Our Slavery

Before Abraham Lincoln was president, he argued his stand against slavery.

“We have in this nation on the element of domestic slavery,” Lincoln stated. “The Republican Party think it wrong—we think it is a moral, a social, and a political wrong.”

Lincoln was right and although he did help conquer some slavery, slavery still exists today.

Sex trafficking is our modern-day slavery. It generates over $32 billion annually worldwide.  According to the US Department of state, about 600,000-800,000 people are trafficked into the United States for forced labor and/or commercial sexual exploitation.

The victims are forced to have sex through violence, threat of violence, or psychological manipulation. They don’t have a choice.

The problem is that these victims are the ones who are being prosecuted, instead of the clients who have claimed ownership of these men, women, and children. Linda Smith, the founder and director of Shared Hope International, an organization that exists to rescue and restore women and children in these crisis situations, put it this way.

“It’s complicated in that the actions of buyers are accepted as normal and the languages of all the cultures label the 14-year-old victimized child a ‘prostitute’ and worthy of little sympathy, much less justice,” Smith stated.

In other words, the innocent victims are being shunned by society and sent to jail, while the ones who should be prosecuted aren’t getting penalized at all, allowing them to continuously enslave innocent people.

Justice must be sought after. The first step is to bring awareness to the public.  This is my step. 

Sources:

http://www.sharedhope.org/

http://www.freedomcenter.org/

The Donkey in a Well

Sometimes when you’re down and everybody’s picking on you: One day a farmer's donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do.

Finally, he decided the animal was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway. He invited all his neighbors to come and help him. They all grabbed a spade and began to shovel dirt into the well.

 

At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then he quieted down. A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well. He was astonished at what he saw. With each shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey would shake it off and take a step up.

 

As the farmer's neighbours continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up. Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and happily trotted off!

I love this folk tale because it reminds me to never let people bring me down and to always persevere until I've accomplished what I wanted to achieve.