Rogerian Argument
There are 7.442 billion people living on this planet as we speak. That is a very large number. Now let me give you a couple more numbers to go along with it. 70 million people; these are the individuals who live with an eating disorder every single day. 36.7 million; these are the people who live with HIV/AIDS in the world. The authors of the readings for which this argument comes from all agree that one of the main reasons that these epidemics have become so out of hand is the media involvement. I believe that if we were more educated about the subject matter at hand, we could find affordable working treatments that these individuals need. Media is the main problem for creating out of proportion ideas about illnesses that …show more content…
When discussing the AIDS epidemic, we usually refer back to the ‘70s and ‘80s, when the epidemic first became a problem. When the media got involved with this breaking news, they turned it from a crisis to a problem of mass hysteria because the only people who were getting AIDS at the time were African American men and gays. Stephen Gould discusses this in his article “The Terrifying Normalcy of AIDS” and he says, “the AIDS pandemic is an issue that may rank with nuclear weaponry as the greatest danger of our era…” (Gould, 635). It also gave more reason for people to discriminate against others and Todd Heywood gives us a perfect example in his article “The Crime of Being Positive,” by saying “ a person could be charged under the HIV Assault Act regardless of whether or not he or she infected or intended to infect another with HIV” (Heywood). This is just a crazy and absurd thing to do to other human beings over a health crisis that was not heavily researched and known about at the time. They show that the media should be limited in a way as to not cause mass hysteria by giving these horrendous examples of how people were treated for having …show more content…
The media has been studied in certain countries that had no connections to the outside world, and the results are horrifying. In Susan Bordo’s, “The Globalization of Eating Disorders,” we find ourselves in 1995 Fiji, where the country is being introduced to television. In Fiji, girls are very comfortable with their bodies and some are very curvy. After three years, they come back to find that the girls have begun to diet and some have developed what we know as eating disorders. Some starve themselves (anorexia) while others binge and purge (bulimia). A study was again conducted in the same year, 1998, that said, “11 percent of girls reported vomiting to control weight, and 62 percent of the girls surveyed reported dieting during the previous months” (Bordo, 640). Another article called “Lying in Weight: The Hidden Epidemic of Eating Disorders in Adult Women,” by Donna Chavez, looks at a piece by Trisha Gura, which describes how women have become used to constantly critiquing themselves and believing they aren’t good enough because they believe they aren’t the perfect size. “Indeed, Gura notes that when symptoms diagnosed as an eating disorder in an adolescent appear in a mature woman, they’re often written off by physicians as something else and go untreated” (Chavez). This has got to stop and that is why these
There are 7.442 billion people living on this planet as we speak. That is a very large number. Now let me give you a couple more numbers to go along with it. 70 million people; these are the individuals who live with an eating disorder every single day. 36.7 million; these are the people who live with HIV/AIDS in the world. The authors of the readings for which this argument comes from all agree that one of the main reasons that these epidemics have become so out of hand is the media involvement. I believe that if we were more educated about the subject matter at hand, we could find affordable working treatments that these individuals need. Media is the main problem for creating out of proportion ideas about illnesses that …show more content…
When discussing the AIDS epidemic, we usually refer back to the ‘70s and ‘80s, when the epidemic first became a problem. When the media got involved with this breaking news, they turned it from a crisis to a problem of mass hysteria because the only people who were getting AIDS at the time were African American men and gays. Stephen Gould discusses this in his article “The Terrifying Normalcy of AIDS” and he says, “the AIDS pandemic is an issue that may rank with nuclear weaponry as the greatest danger of our era…” (Gould, 635). It also gave more reason for people to discriminate against others and Todd Heywood gives us a perfect example in his article “The Crime of Being Positive,” by saying “ a person could be charged under the HIV Assault Act regardless of whether or not he or she infected or intended to infect another with HIV” (Heywood). This is just a crazy and absurd thing to do to other human beings over a health crisis that was not heavily researched and known about at the time. They show that the media should be limited in a way as to not cause mass hysteria by giving these horrendous examples of how people were treated for having …show more content…
The media has been studied in certain countries that had no connections to the outside world, and the results are horrifying. In Susan Bordo’s, “The Globalization of Eating Disorders,” we find ourselves in 1995 Fiji, where the country is being introduced to television. In Fiji, girls are very comfortable with their bodies and some are very curvy. After three years, they come back to find that the girls have begun to diet and some have developed what we know as eating disorders. Some starve themselves (anorexia) while others binge and purge (bulimia). A study was again conducted in the same year, 1998, that said, “11 percent of girls reported vomiting to control weight, and 62 percent of the girls surveyed reported dieting during the previous months” (Bordo, 640). Another article called “Lying in Weight: The Hidden Epidemic of Eating Disorders in Adult Women,” by Donna Chavez, looks at a piece by Trisha Gura, which describes how women have become used to constantly critiquing themselves and believing they aren’t good enough because they believe they aren’t the perfect size. “Indeed, Gura notes that when symptoms diagnosed as an eating disorder in an adolescent appear in a mature woman, they’re often written off by physicians as something else and go untreated” (Chavez). This has got to stop and that is why these