Class assignment

1) When Cinderella wishes for things, the things she wishes for and gets are desirable. The way in which they are delivered is not so desirable. “Whenever she wished for anything the dove would drop it like an egg upon the ground.” This conjures up mental images of a dove laying a dress and slippers later on in the story, which in my opinion seems a little disgusting. Who wants to wear a dress that has been inside of a bird?

2) The idea of “living happily ever after” is one sought by many. Little girls have been taught, through fairy tales and Disney, that once you find the person you love it is smooth sailing from there. After love everything just works, without question. This same idea is found “Cinderella”, except Sexton paints the real picture. “Living happily ever after” wouldn’t be living at all. “Like two dolls in a museum case.” That isn’t real. That isn’t how life works. Sexton is saying that, even when you find that person you love and cherish, there are problems. There are diapers, dust, arguments, and monotony. I wouldn’t want to end up as some fake form of love, living only to smile and seem happy.

3) I believe women and men do ridiculous things to be something they are not just to impress the person they want to be with. Why else would plastic surgery be such a popular practice? It is really hard for me to believe that a woman or a man really wants to have a face lift every 2 months, along with liposuction and who knows what else, just because they want to do it. They do it because they are trying to fit into the shoe that society dropped. Society has created this basically unattainable mold for women and men to try and fit into, through television, magazines, music and any other medium where society can convey what people should be like to be happy and successful.

4) I think this passage really sums it up. “Advertising thus does not work by creating values and attitudes out of nothing but by drawing upon and rechanneling concerns that the target audience (and the culture) already shares. As one advertising executive put it: "Advertising doesn't always mirror how people are acting but how they're dreaming. In a sense what we're doing is wrapping up your emotions and selling them back to you." Advertising absorbs and fuses a variety of symbolic practices and discourses, it appropriates and distills from an unbounded range of cultural references. In so doing, goods are knitted into the fabric of social life and cultural significance. As such, advertising is not simple manipulation, but what admaker Tony Schwartz calls "partipulation," with the audience participating in its own manipulation.”

5) The commodity-image system is basically the idea that advertising tries to get us to buy things by making us feel that they will make us happy. So we are constantly be bombarded with things that we may not want and need, but are convinced to feel that we want and need them because they are supposed to make us happy. Jhally sees this kind of advertising as a type of propaganda.