Gay marriages

Homosexuality could look like very strange to "normal" people, and also "normal" people could see homosexuals as second class citizens in their daily life. I witnessed some stupid behaviors which had aims like humiliating gays in front of people or endamaging them. Why do they have to face these kinds of problems because of just their sexual preferences? Why do all people interested in or concerned with their sexual choices? I think these questions must be discussed to come up with healthy outcomes.

On the other hand, marriage exists as a problem for homosexuals. Gays or lesbians are not allowed to marry in most countries. One of the texts that we read last week claimed that government must be excluded from marriages and government should not interfere anything that related to marriage. What my opinion is governments should be the protector of the legal rights of spouses. In other words, governments ought to carry on their duties. Moreover, homosexual marriages should be legal. It is ridiculous to make decisions for someone else, therefore, all people especially homosexuals should have the rights of choosing their partner. States exists for people, that’s why, most important task of states must be making people happy.

About Marriage

Marriage could be seen as a social contract between couples who usually love each other. I said usually, because as we know, love might not be the priority for people nowadays.
Furthermore, marriage is the way of living together that is socially accepted. Living together doesn't require for you to be married with your couple, however, otherwise you can face with social pressure that will sadden you. Moreover, when we talk about the goals of marriage, these goals could include couples' the wish of living together in whole life, dreaming of having baby and also could include their need for a partner that could help whenever one of them need help.

Comment on Lesson

I think everything about Eng 101 class was very good. There were pretty good things that made lessons more attractive. For instance, there were not much homework that was obliged to us and it helped all of the students to participate lesson. Because when a student don't read the text that s/he must do, that lesson could be unprofitable. The thing I want to emphasize is this lesson was student centered.

Secondly, there was a discussion ambience in classroom. That helped everybody to encourage in the topic. I loved English for the first time and I hope I could take Eng 102 from Hatice Sarigul again...

Piracy

In recent times, film and music sector are being affected by piracy. Most important reason for this is spread of the using internet. Musicians always say that, they are suffered from this situation and it is terrible for them. We can understand their problem, their revenue from this work decreased dramatically. However, i can't think anything to stop this piracy. Some people claim that if downloading process could be prevented by some technologies it would be better. However, i think it is impossible to control every downloading and prevent the illegal ones.

On the other hand, film sector lesser affected by internet downloading compared to music sector. Because, it is difficult to download a film when it has just been published. You can download a movie, after the original dvd of that movie is published. Therefore, people could watch movies in cinemas if they want to watch at that moment. Furthermore, going to the cinema is a good activity for people and i think most people agree with me.

Feminism vs Beauty Myth

In opposition to the pressure and dominance of men, a great movement named “feminism” emerged. This movement’s aim was establishing and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. When it emerged, it looked so attractive to women that were harmed by sexism and gender roles. Their only aim was creating equal genders in every field.

Before this movement, women were being hold by customs; customs were telling what a woman should do, what her mission in the society is etc. After this movement, media have been used. A beauty definition was created by media thereby, created by men. This beauty myth were telling women should not eat so much, they should be more slim than ever before and with models were used in media, women were told that they should be like models.

It can look as a normal situation. However, all of these media and models etc. used for shift women’s attention and finally making women powerless.

I think these struggles are needless. If we live together in this world, everyone should be equal and should have same rights.

Presentations in General

Presentations were pretty good I think. However, there are several problems that what caught my eye. Firstly, people must take a lesson from the past and should not have done same mistakes. For example, it is talked in classroom that presenters should only mention about how gender roles explained in the films. After this speech, explaining events in the films did not look good to me so much, because it was irrelevant to our topic. Secondly, I think presenters should talk in order, one group did the opposite and it was not good so much. After all, except a few things everything was okay about presentations.

Fried Green Tomatoes

We tried to include, both race and gender issues to our presentation at first. After we learned that it must be only the topic of gender, we started to prepare presentation from the beginning. We changed nearly whole presentation and prepared it until 4 am, but it did not look strange to us :). I think except language mistakes and stumbling while we were talking sometimes, our presentation was really good. However, I saw many people that were sleeping, maybe they did not agree with us regarding our presentation.

Dominance of Men

When we read the “Story of an hour” text, we clearly saw the dominance of men in the house. In the story, woman who received news about her husband that he died in an accident became very happy and talked about her feelings like freedom. Of course, this situation is not valid for everyone; however it is correct for many house lives. What meant by dominance of men in the house could be change through situations. It could be the pressure on wife and telling her what to do or not to do, or it could be the decisions are taken by only husband, and the worst of all it could be the using violence upon woman. This sounds very stupid actually, which century do we live in? Men and women must be equal in every part of life.

What to do for being a man?

Answer of this question changes from time to time. In our times, for being a man, males should indicate their masculinity and their power to both females and other males. For doing this, they use different ways like having gun or other stuff that will help them to achieve their goals. Of course, anything about this situation is not accepted by the rest. However, young people don’t care about that. I am also a young male person and all of these look like nonsense and unnecessary, then it is mostly about the one’s family and environment.

"Saving money" or "Saving people" ?

I mentioned about TV in my previous writing. There is a case about the creators of news, the reporters. We have watched a short video and read a story in the classroom that explains reporters’ dilemmas about their work. They are being paid for their news, for their news’ fascination.

War correspondents are the most affected ones who work in combat areas. They face with hundreds of murdered people and maybe they witness some of the murders. It is a very bad situation for a person. However, they must report the news to show exactly what the condition there is and also they must work for their family who needs money. On the other hand, they may want to stop wars and they may want to save the innocent people from this murdering. It is impossible for them to do like that as they know. Here is the dilemma emerges, which one is important “Saving money” or “Saving people”?

TV is surely drug

Anyone could not claim that s/he doesn’t watch TV. TV is in our life whether we want it to be. If we look at TV as a drug metaphor, it says TV is a drug with its effects and giving up this drug is very difficult. However, it is not the case for everyone. I believe in that there are conscious viewers who know what to do. They should know when they will watch TV and when they won’t. These people don’t use TV like a drug.

On the other hand most people couldn’t be a conscious viewer. They tie up TV with strong bonds like they are addicted to this object. They watch TV sometimes because of running away from problems, sometimes just to have fun etc. However, TV has covered their big part of life although they are not aware of that.

When we look at the effects of TV a little bit, we can see TV creates passivity, this passivity could harm people’s health and also we can see that most of the family rituals are being destroyed by TV. In fact, most affected ones are children, while they are in learning process and also they have more sensitive body that could be easily affected.

The most important thing here is, these people who use TV like a drug should be shown that they can live without TV and they can give up using this drug.