Rhetorical Analysis Of 'Scenes From Exhibitionists'

Privacy was once valued and protected. Diaries came with locks to keep the writer’s privately recorded thoughts from being read by others. Public telephones were enclosed in booths so that conversations would not be overheard. But now people feel free to post information about themselves on social networking web sites and carry on cell phone conversations in public places. In “Scenes from Exhibitionists”Hymowitz criticizes that girls who expose their privacy, especially the sexual contents, to the public to declare freer sex are naive and makes her argument persuasive by adopting several rhetorical devices including appeal to ethos, pathos, and logos. By using appeal to ethos, Hymowitz establishes her credibility as a writer to talk about women related issues, which helps her to progress to her final writing end: to educate the young girls to recognize the danger of exposing their intimate privacy to the public. Hymowitz begins her essay by …show more content…
By describing that “they underestimate the magnetic force field created by intimate sexual information”(Hymowitiz 235), Hymowitiz follows with how “Merkin published an essay in the New Yorker describing the erotic pleasure she found in spanking. Her sensational article hardly stalled her career” (235) to emphasize the terrifying consequence of self-exposure to the public. Hymowitiz’s emotionally loaded diction such as “media-driven age” and “watched by hordes of strangers who have only fragmentary information about them” can easily arouse her readers’ concerns, which successfully satisfies Hymowitiz’s writing purpose of warning the young women the negative consequence of following the celebrities to expose the private lives to the public. Reaching the consensus of the negative results, Hymowitiz’s warning are more likely to be taken serious considerations by her