Tuesday, April 16, 2013

entry 3- Đinh Thị Ngọc Chi

Item 1: A clip

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXQSkE9J4N8)
Type of bias: Prejudice
Analysis: This is a commercial of Pond's Flawless White (Philippines version). It is undeniable that Pond's function is to whiten and lighten the skin but the story presented in the commercial is not so romantic as how people think about it at first. We can see from the advertisement that the boy left his girlfriend for another whiter girl although she has waited for him for 5 years. The former girl was so upset. Later she saw a Pond's commercial and its white-care function, she used it and her skin became whiter. When the boy came to her slower shop and saw her, he was surprised by her beauty. In the end, the girl, who was white and beautiful then and the boy got back together. This is an example of prejudice about the not-so-white girl. Maybe it's not pond's attention to show their racist attitude to women with dark complexion, but what we can refer from the story is that those dark girls are not beautiful (just after they use Pond's product they become beautiful) and more seriously, they don't find their true love (because the boys will find whiter ones who they regard as "beautiful").

Item 2: An article
(Source: http://articles.latimes.com/2001/dec/02/news/mn-10519)
Mrs. Liu could have had three daughters by now. But the shame and legal costs would have been unbearable, so she gave her second daughter away at birth and aborted a third when an ultrasound scan showed that fetus, too, was female.
In 1949, the Communist Party took power promising to end centuries of degradation for China's women. Yet hundreds of thousands of unwanted baby girls are abandoned, aborted and even killed each year.
For poor, rural families, the choice is as stark as it is cruel. To keep a girl risks public ridicule in villages where traditions favoring boys still run strong.
Government limits on family sizes imposed since 1979 also mean that by keeping a girl, couples can lose their chance for a boy--long prized in China as the heir who will carry on the family name, till the family plot and care for his parents in old age.
"A woman without a son will be cursed by her mother-in-law and laughed at by the village," says Liu, a farmer in the impoverished eastern province of Anhui. "Everybody thinks it's the duty of a woman to bear a boy."
Liu, 36, asks that her full name not be used for fear that village officials who enforce birth quotas might punish her if they learned of the daughter she gave away. Those quotas, aimed at slowing the growth of China's population, now 1.26 billion, limit rural families to one child, or two if the first is a girl. A third would have brought Mrs. Liu heavy fines or maybe even a forced abortion......................................"

Type of bias: scapegoating and discrimination
Analysis: unwanted baby girls are abandoned, aborted and even killed each year because of the tradition that boy is the heir of the family. Baby girls are seriously rejected in the community. This is scapegoating. And women who give birth to girls (Mrs. Liu in the article as an example) are treated unfairly and  burdened by the "duty" that they are supposed to conduct "bear a boy for the family" This is definitely a kind of discrimination.

Item 3: A photo 
Type of bias: assumption
Analysis: We can see in the picture two rabbits with their 2 carrots. The rabbit in the right of the picture is very proud of his carrot because the there are so many big green leaf top of the carrot. He looks down on the other because his carrot has small leaf top. However the former doesn't know that under these big leaves lies a tiny carrot and under that small leaf top lies a huge carrot. This is a kind of assumption because the rabbit in the right judges too quickly based on what he sees obviously, and doesn't think about other facts, which may be hidden and not spotted immediately. 

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