A.#Dahl# Rhetorical Analysis Essay Readings · A.#Dahl# Rhetorical Analysis Essay Readings# If#there#is#one#thing#Ido#know#aboutmy#life,#itis#the#power#of#the#spotlight.#Sometimes#itgets#

A. Dahl Rhetorical Analysis Essay Readings

Caitlyn Jenner’s ESPY Awards Speech Caitlyn Jenner stood before a standing ovation at the 2015 ESPY Awards in Los Angeles to receive the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage. This was her speech in full. Thank you so much. It is so wonderful to be here tonight. Now the last few months have been a whirlwind of so many different experiences and emotions. But to tell you the truth, it seems like every time I turn around in life, I’m putting myself in these high-‐pressured situations. Competing in the Games, raising a family. But I’ve never felt more pressured than I ever have in my life, than over the last couple of months. Picking out this outfit — O.K., girls, I get it! [Laughter.] You’ve got to get the shoes, the hair, the makeup, the whole process — it was exhausting. And next, the fashion police — please be kind on me, I’m new at this. Anyway, I just want to say a quick shout out to our soccer team [applause]. Ladies, you clean up very well. But the real truth is, before a few months ago I had never met anybody else who was trans, who was like me. I had never met a trans person, never. Now, as you just saw, I dealt with my situation on my own in private and that turned this journey into an already incredible education. It’s been eye-‐opening, inspiring, but also frightening. All across this country, right now, all across the world, at this very moment, there are young people coming to terms with being transgender. They’re learning that they are different and they are trying to figure out how to handle that, on top of every other problem that a teenager has. They’re getting bullied, they’re getting beaten up, they’re getting murdered and they’re committing suicide. The numbers that you just heard before are staggering, but they are the reality of what it is like to be trans today. Just last month, the body of 17-‐year-‐old Mercedes Williamson, a transgender young woman of color, was found in a field in Mississippi stabbed to death. I also want to tell you about Sam Taub, a 15-‐year-‐old transgender young man from Bloomfield, Michigan. In early April, Sam took his own life. Now, Sam’s story haunts me in particular because his death came just a few days before ABC aired my interview with Diane Sawyer. Every time something like this happens, people wonder, ‘Could it have been different, if spotlighting this issue with more attention could have changed the way things happen?’ We’ll never know.


If there is one thing I do know about my life, it is the power of the spotlight. Sometimes it gets overwhelming, but with attention comes responsibility. As a group, as athletes, how you conduct your lives, what you say, what you do, is absorbed and observed by millions of people, especially young people. I know I’m clear with my responsibility going forward, to tell my story the right way — for me, to keep learning, to do whatever I can to reshape the landscape of how trans issues are viewed, how trans people are treated. And then more broadly to promote a very simple idea: accepting people for who they are. Accepting people’s differences. My plea to you tonight is to join me in making this one of your issues as well. How do we start? We start with education. I was fortunate enough to meet Arthur Ashe a few times and I know how important education was to him. Learn as much as you can about another person to understand them better. I know the people in this room have respect for hard work, for training, for going through something difficult to achieve the outcome that you desire. I trained hard, I competed hard, and for that, people respected me. But this transition has been harder on me than anything I could imagine. And that’s the case for so many others besides me. For that reason alone, trans people deserve something vital. They deserve your respect. And from that respect comes a more compassionate community, a more empathetic society and a better world for all of us. There have been so many who have traveled this road before me. From, in sports, Renée Richards to Chaz Bono, to Laverne Cox, and many others. Janet Mock is here tonight. And I want to thank them all publicly, as well as the ESPYs, and the late Arthur Ashe, for giving me this platform to start the next phase of my journey. I also want to acknowledge all the young trans athletes who are out there — given the chance to play sports as who they really are. And now, as of this week, it appears that trans people will soon be serving in the military. That’s a great idea. We have come a long way. But we have a lot of work to do. I’d like to thank, personally, my buddy Diane Sawyer. You know, you can only tell your story the first time once, and Diane you did it so authentically and so gracefully. And me and the community are so thankful for that. And I thank you so much Diane. I’m so proud to have you as a friend. Here comes the tough part. I’d like to thank my family. The biggest fear in Caitlyn Jenner coming out was I never wanted to hurt anyone else, most of all my family and my kids. I always wanted my children to be so proud of their dad because of what he was able to accomplish in his life. You guys have given so much back to me, you’ve given me so much support. I’m so, so grateful to have all of you in my life. Thank you.


And certainly last, but not least, my mother. My mom who, just a little over a week ago, had to have surgery and I didn’t think she was going to make it, but she is here with me tonight to share this night. Now, you know I always thought that I got my courage and my determination from my dad, who landed on Omaha Beach and fought all the way through World War II. But you know what I’m realizing now, Mom, I think I got all those qualities from you. I love you very much. I’m so glad you’re here to share this with me. You know, it is an honor to have the word courage associated with my life. But tonight another word comes to mind, and that is fortunate. I owe a lot to sports. It has shown me the world, it has given me an identity. If someone wanted to bully me, well, you know what? I was the MVP of the football team. That just wasn’t going to be a problem. And the same thing goes tonight. If you want to call me names, make jokes, doubt my intentions, go ahead, because the reality is, I can take it. But for the thousands of kids out there coming to terms with being true to who they are, they shouldn’t have to take it. So for the people out there wondering what this is all about — whether it’s about courage or controversy or publicity — well, I’ll tell you what it’s all about. It’s about what happens from here. It’s not just about one person, it’s about thousands of people. It’s not just about me, it’s about all of us accepting one another. We are all different. That’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing. And while it may not be easy to get past the things you always don’t understand, I want to prove that it is absolutely possible if we only do it together. Thanks you so much for this platform. Thank you so much for this honor bestowed on myself and my family.”


Leonardo DiCaprio’s UN Climate Summit Speech (September 23, 2014)

Thank you, Mr Secretary General, your excellencies, ladies and gentleman, and distinguished guests. I’m honored to be here today, I stand before you not as an expert but as a concerned citizen, one of the 400,000 people who marched in the streets of New York on Sunday, and the billions of others around the world who want to solve our climate crisis. As an actor I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems. I believe humankind has looked at climate change in that same way: as if it were a fiction, happening to someone else’s planet, as if pretending that climate change wasn’t real would somehow make it go away. But I think we know better than that. Every week, we’re seeing new and undeniable climate events, evidence that accelerated climate change is here now. We know that droughts are intensifying, our oceans are warming and acidifying, with methane plumes rising up from beneath the ocean floor. We are seeing extreme weather events, increased temperatures, and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice-‐sheets melting at unprecedented rates, decades ahead of scientific projections. None of this is rhetoric, and none of it is hysteria. It is fact. The scientific community knows it, Industry and governments know it, even the United States military knows it. The chief of the US navy’s Pacific command, admiral Samuel Locklear, recently said that climate change is our single greatest security threat. My Friends, this body – perhaps more than any other gathering in human history – now faces that difficult task. You can make history ... or be vilified by it. To be clear, this is not about just telling people to change their light bulbs or to buy a hybrid car. This disaster has grown BEYOND the choices that individuals make. This is now about our industries, and governments around the world taking decisive, large-‐scale action. I am not a scientist, but I don’t need to be. Because the world’s scientific community has spoken, and they have given us our prognosis, if we do not act together, we will surely perish. Now is our moment for action. We need to put a pricetag on carbon emissions, and eliminate government subsidies for coal, gas, and oil companies. We need to end the free ride that industrial polluters have been given


in the name of a free-‐market economy, they don’t deserve our tax dollars, they deserve our scrutiny. For the economy itself will die if our ecosystems collapse. The good news is that renewable energy is not only achievable but good economic policy. New research shows that by 2050 clean, renewable energy could supply 100% of the world’s energy needs using existing technologies, and it would create millions of jobs. This is not a partisan debate; it is a human one. Clean air and water, and a livable climate are inalienable human rights. And solving this crisis is not a question of politics. It is our moral obligation – if, admittedly, a daunting one. We only get one planet. Humankind must become accountable on a massive scale for the wanton destruction of our collective home. Protecting our future on this planet depends on the conscious evolution of our species. This is the most urgent of times, and the most urgent of messages. Honoured delegates, leaders of the world, I pretend for a living. But you do not. The people made their voices heard on Sunday around the world and the momentum will not stop. And now it’s YOUR turn, the time to answer the greatest challenge of our existence on this planet ... is now. I beg you to face it with courage. And honesty. Thank you. (From: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/23/leonarodo-‐dicaprio-‐un-‐climate-‐change-‐speech-‐new-‐york)


10 Words Every Girl Should Learn by Soraya Chemaly This article updated from original, which appeared in Role Reboot.

"Stop interrupting me." "I just said that." "No explanation needed." In fifth grade, I won the school

courtesy prize. In other words, I won an award for being polite. My brother, on the other hand, was considered the class comedian. We were very typically socialized as a "young lady" and a "boy being a boy." Globally, childhood politeness lessons are gender asymmetrical. We socialize girls to take turns, listen more carefully, not curse and resist interrupting in ways we do not expect boys to. Put another way, we generally teach girls subservient habits and boys to exercise dominance. I routinely find myself in mixed-‐gender environments (life) where men interrupt me. Now that I've decided to try and keep track, just out of curiosity, it's quite amazing how often it happens. It's particularly pronounced when other men are around. This irksome reality goes along with another -‐-‐ men who make no eye contact. For example, a waiter who only directs information and questions to men at a table, or the man last week who simply pretended I wasn't part of a circle of five people (I was the only woman). We'd never met before and barely exchanged 10 words, so it couldn't have been my not-‐so-‐shrinking-‐violet opinions. These two ways of establishing dominance in conversation, frequently based on gender, go hand-‐in-‐hand with this last one: A woman, speaking clearly and out loud, can say something that no one appears to hear, only to have a man repeat it minutes, maybe seconds later, to accolades and group discussion. After I wrote about the gender confidence gap recently, of the 10 items on a list, the one that resonated the most was the issue of whose speech is considered important. In sympathetic response to what I wrote, a person on Twitter sent me a cartoon in which one woman and five men sit around a conference table. The caption reads, "That's an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it." I don't think there is a woman alive who has not had this happen. The cartoon may seem funny, until you realize exactly how often it seriously happens. And -‐-‐ as in the cases of Elizabeth Warren or say, Brooksley Born -‐-‐ how broadly consequential the impact can be. When you add race and class to the equation the incidence of this marginalization is even higher. This suppressing of women's voices, in case you are trying to figure out what Miss Triggs was wearing or drinking or might have said to provoke this response, is what sexism sounds like.


These behaviors, the interrupting and the over-‐talking, also happen as the result of difference in status, but gender rules. For example, male doctors invariably interrupt patients when they speak, especially female patients, but patients rarely interrupt doctors in return. Unless the doctor is a woman. When that is the case, she interrupts far less and is herself interrupted more. This is also true of senior managers in the workplace. Male bosses are not frequently talked over or stopped by those working for them, especially if they are women; however, female bosses are routinely interrupted by their male subordinates. This preference for what men have to say, supported by men and women both, is a variant on "mansplaining." The word came out of an article by writer Rebecca Solnit, who explained that the tendency some men have to grant their own speech greater import than a perfectly competent woman's is not a universal male trait, but the "intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness where some portion of that gender gets stuck." Solnit's tipping point experience really did take the cake. She was talking to a man at a cocktail party when he asked her what she did. She replied that she wrote books and she described her most recent one, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. The man interrupted her soon after she said the word Muybridge and asked, "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?" He then waxed on, based on his reading of a review of the book, not even the book itself, until finally, a friend said, "That's her book." He ignored that friend (also a woman) and she had to say it more than three times before "he went ashen" and walked away. If you are not a woman, ask any woman you know what this is like, because it is not fun and happens to all of us. In the wake of Larry Summers' "women can't do math" controversy several years ago, scientist Ben Barres wrote publicly about his experiences, first as a woman and later in life, as a male. As a female student at MIT, Barbara Barres was told by a professor after solving a particularly difficult math problem, "Your boyfriend must have solved it for you." Several years after, as Ben Barres, he gave a well-‐received scientific speech and he overhead a member of the audience say, "His work is much better than his sister's." Most notably, he concluded that one of the major benefits of being male was that he could now "even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man." I've had teenage boys, irritatingly but hysterically, excuse what they think is "lack of understanding" to [my] "youthful indiscretion." Last week as I sat in a cafe, a man in his 60′s stopped to ask me what I was writing. I told him I was writing a book about gender and media and he said, "I went to a conference where someone talked about that a few years ago. I read a paper about it a few years ago. Did you know that car manufacturers use slightly denigrating images of women to sell cars? I'd be happy to help you." After I suggested, smiling cheerily, that the images were beyond denigrating and definitively injurious to women's dignity, free speech and parity in culture, he drifted off. It's not hard to fathom why so many men tend to assume they are great and that what they have to say is more legitimate. It starts in childhood and never ends. Parents interrupt girls twice as often and hold them to stricter politeness norms. Teachers engage boys, who correctly see disruptive speech as a marker of dominant masculinity, more often and more dynamically than girls.


As adults, women's speech is granted less authority and credibility. We aren't thought of as able critics or as funny. Men speak more, more often, and longer than women in mixed groups (classrooms, boardrooms, legislative bodies, expert media commentary and, for obvious reasons religious institutions.) Indeed, in male-‐dominated problem solving groups including boards, committees and legislatures, men speak 75% more than women, with negative effects on decisions reached. That's why, as researchers summed up, "Having a seat at the table is not the same as having a voice." Even in movies and television, male actors engage in more disruptive speech and garner twice as much speaking and screen time as their female peers. This is by no means limited by history or to old media but is replicated online. Listserve topics introduced by men have a much higher rate of response and on Twitter, people retweet men two times as often as women. These linguistic patterns are consequential in many ways, not the least of which is the way that they result in unjust courtroom dynamics, where adversarial speech governs proceedings and gendered expression results in women's testimonies being interrupted, discounted and portrayed as not credible according to masculinized speech norms. Courtrooms also show exactly how credibility and status, women's being lower, are also doubly affected by race. If Black women testifying in court adopt what is often categorized as "[white] women's language," they are considered less credible. However, if they are more assertive, white jurors find them "rude, hostile, out of control, and, hence [again], less credible." Silence might be an approach taken by women to adapt to the double bind, but silence doesn't help when you're testifying. The best part though is that we are socialized to think women talk more. Listener bias results in most people thinking that women are hogging the floor when men are actually dominating. Linguists have concluded that much of what is popularly understood about women and men being from different planets, verbally, confuses "women's language" with "powerless language." There are, of course, exceptions that illustrate the role that gender (and not biological sex) plays. For example, I have a very funny child who regularly engages in simultaneous speech, disruptively interrupts and randomly changes topics. If you read a script of a one of our typical conversations, you would probably guess the child is a boy based on the fact that these speech habits are what we think of as "masculine." The child is a girl, however. She's more comfortable with overt displays of assertiveness and confidence than the average girl speaker. It's hard to balance making sure she keeps her confidence with teaching her to be polite. However, excessive politeness norms for girls, expected to set an example for boys, have real impact on women who are, as we constantly hear, supposed to override their childhood socialization and learn to talk like men to succeed (learn to negotiate, demand higher pay, etc.). The first time I ran this post, I kid you not, the first response I got was from a Twitter user, a man, who, without a shred of self-‐awareness, asked, "What would you say if a man said those things to you mid-‐conversation?" Socialized male speech dominance is a significant issue, not just in school, but everywhere. If you doubt me, sit quietly and keep track of speech dynamics at your own dinner table, workplace, classroom. In the school bus, the sidelines of fields, in places of worship. It's significant and consequential.


People often ask me what to teach girls or what they themselves can do to challenge sexism when they see it. "What can I do if I encounter sexism? It's hard to say anything, especially at school." In general, I'm loathe to take the approach that girls should be responsible for the world's responses to them, but I say to them, practice these words, every day: "Stop interrupting me," "I just said that," and "No explanation needed." It will do both boys and girls a world of good. And no small number of adults, as well. (From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-‐chemaly/10-‐words-‐every-‐girl-‐should-‐learn_b_5544203.html)


Does Media Violence Lead to the Real Thing? By VASILIS K. POZIOS, PRAVEEN R. KAMBAM and H. ERIC BENDER

EARLIER this summer the actor Jim Carrey, a star of the new superhero movie “Kick-‐Ass 2,” tweeted that he was distancing himself from the film because, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, “in all good conscience I cannot support” the movie’s extensive and graphically violent scenes. Mark Millar, a creator of the “Kick-‐Ass” comic book series and one of the movie’s executive producers, responded that he has “never quite bought the notion that violence in fiction leads to violence in real life any more than Harry Potter casting a spell creates more boy wizards in real life.” While Mr. Carrey’s point of view has its adherents, most people reflexively agree with Mr. Millar. After all, the logic goes, millions of Americans see violent imagery in films and on TV every day, but vanishingly few become killers.

But a growing body of research indicates that this reasoning may be off base. Exposure to violent imagery does not preordain violence, but it is a risk factor. We would never say: “I’ve smoked cigarettes for a long time, and I don’t have lung cancer. Therefore there’s no link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.” So why use such flawed reasoning when it comes to media violence? There is now consensus that exposure to media violence is linked to actual violent behavior — a link found by many scholars to be on par with the correlation of exposure to secondhand smoke and the risk of lung cancer. In a meta-‐analysis of 217 studies published between 1957 and 1990, the psychologists George Comstock and Haejung Paik found that the short-‐term effect of exposure to media violence on actual physical violence against a person was moderate to large in strength. Mr. Comstock and Ms. Paik also conducted a meta-‐analysis of studies that looked at the correlation between habitual viewing of violent media and aggressive behavior at a point in time. They found 200 studies showing a moderate, positive relationship between watching television violence and physical aggression against another person. Other studies have followed consumption of violent media and its behavioral effects throughout a person’s lifetime. In a meta-‐analysis of 42 studies involving nearly 5,000 participants, the psychologists Craig A. Anderson and Brad J. Bushman found a statistically


significant small-‐to-‐moderate-‐strength relationship between watching violent media and acts of aggression or violence later in life. In a study published in the journal Pediatrics this year, the researchers Lindsay A. Robertson, Helena M. McAnally and Robert J. Hancox showedthat watching excessive amounts of TV as a child or adolescent — in which most of the content contains violence — was causally associated with antisocial behavior in early adulthood. (An excessive amount here means more than two hours per weekday.) The question of causation, however, remains contested. What’s missing are studies on whether watching violent media directly leads to committing extreme violence. Because of the relative rarity of acts like school shootings and because of the ethical prohibitions on developing studies that definitively prove causation of such events, this is no surprise. Of course, the absence of evidence of a causative link is not evidence of its absence. Indeed, in 2005, The Lancet published a comprehensive review of the literature on media violence to date. The bottom line: The weight of the studies supports the position that exposure to media violence leads to aggression, desensitization toward violence and lack of sympathy for victims of violence, particularly in children. In fact the surgeon general, the National Institute of Mental Health and multiple professional organizations — including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association — all consider media violence exposure a risk factor for actual violence. To be fair, some question whether the correlations are significant enough to justify considering media violence a substantial public health issue. And violent behavior is a complex issue with a host of other risk factors. But although exposure to violent media isn’t the only or even the strongest risk factor for violence, it’s more easily modified than other risk factors (like being male or having a low socioeconomic status or low I.Q.). Certainly, many questions remain and more research needs to be done to determine what specific factors drive a person to commit acts of violence and what role media violence might play. But first we have to consider how best to address those questions. To prevent and treat public health issues like AIDS, cancer and heart disease, we focus on modifying factors correlated with an increased risk of a bad outcome. Similarly, we should strive to identify risk factors for violence and determine how they interact, who may be particularly affected by such factors and what can be done to reduce modifiable risk factors.


Naturally, debate over media violence stirs up strong emotions because it raises concerns about the balance between public safety and freedom of speech. Even if violent media are conclusively found to cause real-‐life violence, we as a society may still decide that we are not willing to regulate violent content. That’s our right. But before we make that decision, we should rely on evidence, not instinct.

Vasilis K. Pozios, Praveen R. Kambam and H. Eric Bender are forensic psychiatrists and the founders of the consulting group Broadcast Thought. (Taken from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/opinion/sunday/does-‐media-‐violence-‐lead-‐to-‐the-‐real-‐thing.html?_r=0)

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A.#Dahl# Rhetorical Analysis Essay Readings · A.#Dahl# Rhetorical Analysis Essay Readings# If#there#is#one#thing#Ido#know#aboutmy#life,#itis#the#power#of#the#spotlight.#Sometimes#itgets#