Maddy Glotfelty

12/12/19
Sellers 1-2

The Face Of The World Weary Child

In our culture, society’s agents construct us from the ground up in order to adhere to a flawed
system. Society stifles people unwittingly and unwillingly into a prison of expectations that are
predetermined before we can crawl. Infants are conceived into a system where they are punished for being
born a certain way, despite the fact that they had no choice in the matter. People are encouraged to follow
the cultural norms with the promise of punitive rebuke if they refuse. People are socialized every day,
every minute, every hour of their existence. Throughout the course of twelve weeks, my peers and I have
gone in-depth into the properties of socialization and identity. Throughout those weeks I have been both
heartened and disturbed by the system we unintentionally use to turn children into capable parts of our
society, and the process by which we apply worth to material and non-material possessions. At its worst it
is the process by which worth is applied to people as though they are possessions. At its best the process
by which parents encourage their children to enjoy life and my parents allowed me to understand that if I
work hard enough I can do anything. Every person in our society can be classified as either targets or
agents through socialization. But it also allows us to realize through the well-spent time talking to new
people that they are still humans, flawed, beautiful humans no matter how different they are from
yourself. I was lucky enough to be born into a family that encourages me to break away from the bars of
oppression and reach for something more. Unfortunately, not everyone is given that ability. The society
we must reach for is a society without oppression, where everyone is given an equal opportunity to live
their best life, where being different isn’t bad, where being female or male doesn’t define you, where
conformity is less important than equality. Inequality and societal conformity to socialization is highly
prevalent in my life through sexism found in the education system, media, and a lack thereof in my
family.
Females are not given the due amount of recognition in the school system. I had never heard the
term Agent and Target Groups until we started looking into socialization. It was one of those things that
you notice but never reach to classify. It was like the education system, so set on raising my peers and me
into the world academically had forgotten the oppression that some people face every day. We wonder
how this oppression is so prevalent throughout certain groups and yet we don’t exactly dissuade or even
discuss this in standard schooling. We talk about oppression like it is something entirely separate from us,
but it’s not. It is found in small slurs, in statements that are jokingly followed by the phrase, “that’s what
she said.” This is something I’ve heard repeated countless times, things that even the most progressive
educators don’t seem to flinch at. The truth that can be paraphrased from both the book Sapiens by Yuval
Noah Harari and the article Cycle Of Socialization by Bobbie Harro. People aren’t biologically created in
order to adhere to civilization and, therefore, are not created to follow the societal norms of oppression,
the concept that some people are better than others is not genetic. It is a concept created by the ignorant.
In a statement made by Obama, "Empowering women isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s the smart thing
to do. When women succeed, nations are more safe, more secure, and more prosperous.” (Obama) And
yet the education system commonly focuses on male predominant struggles, rather than delve into
females’ significant role in history. It is therefore reasonable that we lead our lives believing that females
had only small roles in the progression of history, but this is far from the truth. It does not seem
reasonable that girls and women alike should need to scour the internet for our predecessor’s fierce
history, while boys get it handed to them on a silver platter. We seem to gloss over the history of our
species, afraid to confront it.
Media is highly reliant upon societal biases in the creation of most female roles. Is it natural for
me to look forward to movies starring female actors more than I look forward to movies starring males? Is
it natural for me to be consistently disappointed when that movie ends with the main character wearing a
spandex suit or a close fitted dress that shows off their figure rather than the more reasonable option
including pants or a shirt? What is the message society is trying to send, that girls can’t beat the bad guy
unless they are wearing skintight clothes and have the perfect physique? There are so many “true stories”
surrounding males and all of the incredible things they have done. Why must I, therefore, search in the
real world for stories of female sacrifice and bravery, while males get recognized regularly in films for
having these qualities. Stories such as the one of Frances Pearlmutter who was an American soldier
recruited out of college for her brilliance. She then became a Japanese code breaker in World War 2 and
helped the US end the horror of the holocaust. Frances is Jewish and likes to refer to herself as a do-er.
She lives in my home town and despite all of her achievements I had never heard of her. I met her by
chance while doing some volunteer work. I have seen movies and TV shows that generally surround
people who did much the same thing, all of them starring males. Meeting her was like opening my eyes to
an entirely different world. There are very few movies that I have ever seen that had a similar effect on
me, one being “Hidden Figures” and as was stated by one of the main characters toward the beginning of
the movie, “they let women do some things over at NASA, Mr. Johnson, but it’s not because we wear
skirts...it’s because we wear glasses.” (Hidden Figures) This is to say that females are not incapable or
any less smart because of their gender, and to take it further, it is that false perception of femininity which
generally causes sexism. Roles like this in the media have a direct influence on the identity of those who
view them. Roles in which realistic, strong females are represented have had a direct role in the identity I
feel I have today. It’s a calling point for young girls to look at and see that we should not be limited just
because of how we look, that we should act as the counterculture against a world of oppression. This is a
message I have believed in since a young age, and work very hard to purvey in my everyday life. It is the
message that I don’t want to fit in and act like you expect me too. I have always hoped that me going
against the tide would keep me separate from the general consensus that I can’t keep up with the guys,
that I can’t play certain sports, that I can’t do certain things. After all, why do I need to dress like all of
the females in the media, when I don’t want to represent the same thing.
“Girls are dropping out of sports at 1.5x the rate that boys do by age 14. By age 17, more than
half of girls will quit playing sports altogether.” (“Girls in Sports” Gatorade) This is a really annoying
statistic in my opinion. In all honesty, I don’t understand how it can be true. Sports have always been the
anchor in my ever changing life. When I have no friends at school, which has happened more commonly
than most people would believe, I could always count on my team. If I couldn’t rely on friends I would
out skate my issues. I like to joke to myself, in my own grim humor, that’s why I got so fast, the faster I
got the faster my problems got and the faster I had to go to escape them. Sports are such a huge part of my
life that, when unable to do them, it feels like I have lost a fundamental part of myself. When I broke my
shoulder, a quarter of the way through biking season, I really struggled. That was one of my greater lapses
into depression. It was one of the times in my life that I held up my thickest “I’m okay” mask, put up my
broadest and most resilient walls. It was one of the moments when inside you feel like you’re screaming
for help and on the outside you smile and laugh like nothing is wrong because you know everyone else
has issues too, many of them worse than your own. The only thing I can really rely on when my silent
despair starts is my sports, which was why breaking my shoulder was so difficult for me. That is why I
struggle to understand the drop-out rates of female athletes.
My family has been a really big factor in my socialization. They are the people who I can express
my most difficult emotions to, the people who see the screaming in my head even if they don’t know
exactly what it means when I go that silent and morose, even if they don’t know how to help. My grandpa
was the first one to tell me the acronym ASFTTB, “Always Stay Faster Than The Boys” and I have tried
all my life to do that. I recognized at a young age that because of my birth as a female (target) in this
society, I would have to work three times harder than any of the guys to get the exact same recognition.
In my desire for that recognition, I found my determination. Not only that, but I have a twin sister, which
drove me to new levels of competitiveness. My mom says sometimes that I am the most determined
person she has ever met. Whether she meant for that statement to become a part of my identity, I don’t
know. It is perhaps the single most powerful form of socialization in my life and directly affects how I
have seen myself in recent years, that message that my mom gave me so long ago. It has affected the
values I will upon myself and how I see myself, after all, as was stated by Charles Cooley, “I am not who
I think I am, I am not who you think I am, I am who I think you think I am.”(Cooley) This refers, not only
to the looking glass self, but to the fact that my perception of how you see me plays a huge role in who I
am. If I feel that my teachers see me as a divergent, I will probably stoop to those expectations and, in
turn I will rise to set expectations as well. Nobody recognizes how many nights I have agonized over the
fact that I might be losing that part of myself, my determination, which I would now consider being an
essential property, just as my arm is an essential property. It was perhaps the hardest part of breaking my
shoulder, watching and feeling as I slowly lost my will to work and keep pushing. It is that lack of
determination that I see so often drive people to stop doing what they love and I can’t imagine that for
myself. My dad likes to say, “If you’re going to do something, do it right.” Not only has this driven me to
reach for my best, but it drives me to look for the most optimistic view in life and strive for adventure and
fun in my everyday mundane tasks. Afterall, if I’m going to live life, I might as well do it right. These
messages have enabled me, if not explicitly willed me to think for myself and search for knowledge. It
was through my family that I learned that knowledge is the process of finding information, wisdom is the
ability to distance yourself enough from that information to discover for yourself what is true.
We commonly neglect and disregard discrimination as something that is entirely seperate from
us. This is ignorance. We discriminate and are discriminated upon constantly. The only way we can begin
to see past these discriminations and broad expectations is by distancing ourselves from them. We must
look for new perspectives and hope to gain empathy, because only then will we create the society for
which we wish. Only then will women and men be equal. Only then will we leave oppression and
accidental and purposeful dehumanization behind.
My mask is primarily represents the perspective I hold throughout my everyday life. The black
and white coloring performs the job of representing my dualistic personality, my general feeling that the
world is black and white with very little gray area in between. On my mask I purposefully included more
white than black because overall I feel that, in all, my life is pretty good. The words down the middle
represent my perspective on the Agents of Socialization and how they have helped to socialize me
throughout my life, both positively (white) and negatively (black).