Twenty-Something Women And The Paradox Of Sexual Freedom

Identity is consist of separate and distinct parts such as culture, gender, behaviour and decisions. Individuals view and opinions also reflects their identity. Conflicting values and violence influence behaviour, value or opinion of an individuals which shapes or changes their identity. Leslie Bell, in her essay selection from Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom writes about dilemmas of sexual freedom that young women face. Bell also discusses how media spreads contradictory messages about women sexuality and how it influences young women. She introduces the term “splitting,” which is a psychological defense that women unconsciously make to solve their problem of contradictory lifestyle choices. Malcolm Gladwell,

Jayanthi explains her sexual violence experience with African men 's in a very lightly manner. When telling her story, Jayanthi didn’t used any word to show she was part of sexual violence, she describe this experience as “ a disturbing version of sexual exploitation” (Bell 36). Bell uses Jayanthi’s example to show how the pressure from society can leave a young women in vulnerable situation. What if Jayanthi used word such as forceful, aggressive or even rape to describe her experience with four African men. It would have made jayanthi more sympathetic to people who heard her story. This kind of word would make people who heard story focus more on violence and criticize the violence instead of thinking what events had led her to end up in that situation. Exaggerated word use to describe influence people 's mind and alter their opinion of an specific matter. Word describe such as “scarecrow” creates an dreadful and terrible portrayal in the public mind. The word was used by sheriff to describe the murder of Matt Shepard, Gladwell writes that “ When he[sheriff] described the situation to us he told us that [Shepard] was found by a mountain bike rider, tied to a fence like a scarecrow”(Loffreda 238). This wording caught public attention and helped creating Shepard 's’ death into a huge issue among public.The images created by this word became a symbol of a cause against violence. If the sheriff hadn’t used exaggerated word it might wouldn’t have caught much public attention. Also people might have seen this issues in a different way. Wording of an event alter the view and opinion of an person which is part of their identity. People 's word also work as “tipping point” for media 's report, which affect the people 's view in much larger