Austin Gremes Nathan Franklin English 101 TTH (8:00am) 1st Part of Reflection Monsters pages 253-257 Preface:

Throughout Tacey Rosolowskis Monsters essay, in Thinking Vertically, it drops off in random areas, and introduces new ideas abruptly. Therefore, the following four essays have been written between some of these drops, and do not flow as a proper essay does. However, that is the style of the writing in Thinking Vertically. Tacey Rosolowski begins with describing the times that she grew up in. The year was 1969, and all her friends were copying their older siblings by joining the love generation and investing in flower power. However, Tracy and her sister fell into monster movies instead. They understand that the movies were not of good quality, in the typical sense, but the two sisters were in love with the monsters themselves, not the story or the human characters. Rosolowski and her sister each related to a different type of monster for a different reason. The sister favored the flying monsters, like Mothra, because she was the youngest in the house and she liked the idea of being able to just fly away when their hectic family became too much. Rosolowski preferred the large lumbering monsters because they were not held back by their weight like she was, being put on a strict calorie count that was strongly enforced by her mother. Rosolowski envied the way that the big monsters threw their weight around and were a force to be reckoned with. For both girls, monster movies, in a way, allowed them to escape their judgment filled and hectic lives. Rosolowskis sister was allowed to fly away from their familys issues and difficulties by getting lost in the television screen. And Rosolowski was allowed to escape judgment in the same way. When she was watching a monster movie she didnt need to

worry about counting her calories, watching how the world saw her, or trying to please anyone by acting and looking how they expected her to act and look. Rosolowski says that adolescents is a time for people to figure out who their self is, but she continues to say that from birth boys and girls are labeled blue or pink and expected to live within certain expectations of what defines each. She explains that, from birth, baby boys are thought of as having a personality and a self that the world is expected to just deal with. Rosolowski describes the blue blanket as representing the phrase Im a boy, and this phrase gives the boy a voice before he can even think about talking. The boy is expected to make the world deal with him, rather than being made to deal with the world, and He should even try to bend the world to suit himself. Rosolowski compares this Im a boy to the pink blankets meaning of Its a girl. She establishes this suggested meaning as reinforcing the idea that girls are seen as objects from the moment of birth, they are literally an it to the world. An object, to be molded into something that the boys expect it to be. Girls are seen as objects of other peoples gaze, as in, something that is meant to be judged and adjusted accordingly by men.