Assignment 1: Larger Social & Historical Events

Throughout chapter one, the author discusses about how the social forces can have an impact on our private lives, sociological imagination. He also described how to view suicide in a sociological perspective rather than attributing an individuals' achievements and failures to their personal qualities. Although, at the age of twelve, I was more interested in sports and eating rather than worrying about how I looked, many other younger girls were having a hard time trying to fit in with other clique's because of their size and fear of being made fun of. The question of being "thin" never really crossed my mind before, but it raised questions on why girls my age would worry so much. I soon realized that the media played a bigger influence than our parents, who would always say to us that we were "perfect just the way we are."

During the time I was twelve years old, society had already sculpted the picture of how women and girls should look like- Thin. Society influenced young adults and girls to look like many celebrities by photo shopping their photos and of models, from news articles to magazines, their audience starts to adore their figure and eventually  change themselves into something they're not. Sociologists tell us that these encounters have a great deal of social influence over our lives. I would wonder at times why girls my age had such an obsession with being  "skinny," never knowing that the image they had in mind was what the media made of them. Similar to the sociological claim that individual behavior was largely shaped by social forces.