The Words Inside of Me

This week in class, we read a study called "Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?" and it claims to debunk the theory that women naturally talk more than men in their daily lives. In our discussion, it came to a point where we decided that this study would not change much in society today because it is more or less considered useless. The idea of which gender talks more would not help benefit or destroy society today, so why should we even think about making a study? Although the study of which gender talks more isn't that important, the study of how much a normal person talks throughout the day could be more helpful to the world. For instance, if there is a person who says more than 20,000 words per day, we can easily classify them as an extrovert. Extroverts are usually known as an out-going or expressive person. If we look at some of the richest people in the world such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, we know that they were very intelligent but to make that intelligence prominent they had to form relationships and work with the people around them constantly. Now when everybody thinks of them, they are looked upon as initiators of a new era. Now, there is no question that there were people just like them who had intelligence but failed. Moreover, they failed not because of their products, but because they didn't expand it outwards toward society. They probably were not outgoing, forcing these other men to build their prominence. Also, there are probably other great products that people create but are not shown to society because they are more of an introvert. If this study of gender stereotypes instead focused on how many words people say per day on an average, we could see the difference between an introvert and extrovert and what they both bring to society. Would the study show the common belief that extroverts have a bigger impact on society or vice versa? If the result is the former, then maybe people could start introverts to expand into society so their ideas could be shared toward the world. Unlike the study that was created to break a gender stereotype which would have no gain to society, this idea could really help change society in a positive way.

The Color Within Me

In class this week, we read one of our first short stories called "There is no unmarked woman" and it led to a great discussion to what we really perceive the world to be. The first thought that comes into my mind when we refer to people as "marked or "unmarked" is markers. These markers, when we were younger, gave us colorful insights to spread our imagination further. When we think of the word "marked", the colors that would symbolize it would be blue, red, yellow, green and so on into the endless swirls of hues. Alternatively, the word "unmarked" associates to us nothing on the page, indicating white. While the "marked category" was categorized as endless colors, the unmarked is characterized as the single color of white. This is exactly what Deborah Tannen tries to distinguish between men and woman. But I strongly clash with this perception. Why do we have to classify people into groups when everyone is distinctively different in some way? For example, everybody is born in different shapes and sizes with different physical features. Why, then, do we have to classify men as unmarked and women as marked? All men do not look the same so why would portray them all as the color of white? Moreover, why do we have to focus on the differences of men and women regarding fashion, surnames or chromosomes? Shouldn't we classify them by their personalities? That is often to be the most intriguing and decisive part of a human because it shapes who you are in the future. Your fashion, for example, will not keep up with you in the future because everybody will grow old. Nobody will really care about how you look but instead focus more on your personality and how you act. If you only care about how you look on the outside and ignore your real feelings inside, when you become old you will be isolated from your peers. Overall, everybody has a different charisma which makes every single person different, so we should not characterize certain people as one color like white but instead characterize each as one of the uncountable colors of the universe.