Proposal #2

Title: A Fathers Role in the Household

Author: Krista Skorupski

Date: 11-08-2012

Topic: The lack of male figures in tender and caring positions, and the small percentage of male housekeepers and stay at home fathers in media.

Exigence: I’m writing this to bring light to the fact that if a society wants change in equality it has to offer a fair representation regardless of gender or intended role.

Intended Audience: The audience of this piece is anyone to hear an opposite stance on the “typical” home situation depicted in media.

Purpose: The purpose of this writing is to shed light on a growing problem of a lack of male figures with tender intentions, and in turn we as a society are creating an inequality without even realizing it.

Claim: Americans lives and needs are changing, and with a new era comes a brand new need for a different set of homemakers to be represented, or at least acknowledged in the media, and those homemakers are men.

LOGOS- Men are becoming more of a statute of the American home, and in-turn should be represented as such. Many forms of media have men represented as firm, dominate, and absent forces in the home setting, and this has caused this particular ideal to projected onto men. Children’s books, commercials, cartoons, and T.V. shows rarely show men in homemaking positions they often depict them as figures that are coming and going and making money. Many of these forms of media don’t seem to do this maliciously it seems it always happens almost absent-mindedly like they didn’t even think of it as a possibility. Men are more commonly choosing to stay at home with their children and they should be represented.

 PATHOS- As a woman who grew up in a female centric home one would think I wouldn’t find an accurate representation of men who stay at home, or those who help make the home what it is important, but I do. Men have been vastly misrepresented or not at all in the home, and what does this cause, a society that believes that a man should be at work, and woman that should be at home. I suppose to break the stereotype of “what women should be” we need to break the stereotype of “what men should be”, and the media is the first step in doing so. Also because I want to be part of the entertainment section of life I feel if I go in with a purpose I can make a difference, and this is something I feel strongly about.

ETHOS- I’m working on this section still.

Some of the articles and sites I’m using for statistics:

http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/30/pf/stay-at-home-dad/index.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/fashion/dads-are-taking-over-as-full-time-parents.html?pagewanted=all

RA#2 The Death of Macho

In Reihan Salam’s, “The Death of Macho”, he discuses how the recession in 2008 will have a far greater effect on men than it will women, and in turn we as a culture will begin to see a shift in power. His appeal to the reader is targeted to a wide array of audience members because of his language and subject matter one could assume this is written for adults of both genders. The article discuses how the economic downturn is due to the over confidence of those in control of the countries money namely men on wall street, but he does not limit the effects to only those men that created the problem. Salam’s main message throughout the piece is that economic growth is leaning towards the favor of those residing within the female gender, and that men need to be accepting of the changes that are inevitably going to come.

Salam references how there have been work force shifts from men to women in financial power before in other countries, but these societies were also patriarchal, and the need for power remained a constant for the men. This resulted in a male populous without a direction to point their disappointment, and the societies didn’t fair well. When a society is built on the structure of male dominance and that dominance shifts it may have nowhere to go. Even though Salam says, “Of course, macho is a state of mind, not just a question of employment status” (Salam 630), he makes a statement not that the word “Macho” is a what makes a man physically, but a statement of status and you must be employed to maintain that status.

Throughout the piece he makes a plea to men to not allow “Macho” to be end of our society as it had been for so many other societies in the past. Salam discusses the fact that it was men who were the ones who created the mess. He brings this up because the men at the top of the banking industry caused the housing market crash.  With examples like Lithuania a society as it’s written in the book quoting a newspaper after the first female president, “Lithuania has decided: The country is to be saved by a woman”(Salam 630). This is important because it shows to his intention of requesting men set aside their obsession with “Macho” and understand a new beginning is on the rise for America.