Taking a Look at Harassment

As many of you have probably seen, there has recently been a video produced showing a woman walking around New York City for ten hours.  The woman receives countless jeers and comments from people she walks by.  This has drawn many different reactions, most of them being that women should not be subjected to this kind of behavior when they simply walk around the streets. (Which they should not, but that is not the focus of this post.)

This boy, Alex, has recently become Twitter famous after a girl snapped a picture of him at work at Target.  The tag #alexfromtarget quickly blew up all over social media.  This boy has become famous enough to attract the attention of TV star Ellen.  

This has created some outrage online about the inequalities between men and women when it comes to harassment.

Here is just one example I found:

The patriarchal society we live in today usually favors men over women.  So there are more men in high power positions, men earn more money than women do in the same position, and things like that.  But sometimes the roles are flip flopped and women have the advantage.  Times when the role is switched is usually seen in divorce cases when women are almost always awarded custody of the child or children, and in this case where both parties were subjected to harassment but only the harassment of the woman was seen as problematic.  There has not been a resounding outcry of protest in taking the creep shot of the boy that works at target, where there have been hundreds of thousands of reactions saying that women should not be subjected to harassment like that.

It just shows that our culture is rooted in the idea that men are strong and therefor are not affected by things like harassment, when they face it just like women do.

Unrealistic Representation

With the recent happenings with Honey Boo Boo and her family, I feel like it would be good to talk about how people in poverty are viewed on television, especially reality television.  The show I would like to talk about is the show on MTV called Teen Mom.  There are two different versions, Teen Mom and Teen Mom 2.  They are all people that were on the MTV show 16 and Pregnant.  TM and TM2 follows the lives of some of the characters as they figure out how to raise a baby and continue moving their lives forward.

The people chosen to take part in 16 and Pregnant are more often than not lower class people from rural/less populated areas.  I have noticed that quite a lot of them are from the southern part of the states.  The moms are usually kids that enjoy going out and partying and are generally not the most responsible people.  Then they end up with an accidental pregnancy and the teenage father freaks out.  Now all of a sudden they have to pay for hospital visits, baby essentials, and sometimes even a place on their own since some of the parents end up kicking the teens out.  

Money is almost always seen as an issue in 16 and Pregnant, but by the time the moms end up on TM or TM2, they are living comfortably.  One instance stands out to me with Kailyn from TM2.  When she was on 16 and Pregnant, she was living with her boyfriend at the time in his home.  His family took care of her and she basically had nothing.  In TM2, Kailyn is able to buy her own home, pay for a wedding, drive a $50k suburban, and live really comfortably.  It gives a false hope to people that live in the lower class that they can so easily turn things around like that.