Tag: writing

Sex Education Season Three: Gendered Difference in Character Development

by No Rules Cornell, posted in Movies & TV, Pop Culture

by Hanna Carney //

The Netflix original Sex Education has been getting a lot of praise for its depiction of sex-positivity and its empowerment of teenagers and adults since Season One was released. Sex Education Season Three was recently released on September 17 2021, and its fan base remains enthusiastic about the series. The show revolves around Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield) as he navigates high school, relationships, and sex. Otis, whose mother is a sex therapist (Gillian Anderson), forms a complicated friendship with Maeve Wiley. Together, they start a small business at their school, educating their peers (and the audience) on sex positivity, safe sex practices, and more. 

Although Otis and Maeve are the respectable main characters, the gems of this season were a few side characters: Adam Groff (Connor Swindells) and Ruby Matthews (Mimi Keene). It’s a running joke online that these two carried Sex Education this season. Adam, a bully-turned-sweetheart, is the boyfriend of Eric Effiong, Otis’ best friend. Ruby, one of the popular girls at Moordale Secondary School, is the fleeting love interest of Otis. We see these characters grow throughout Sex Education Season Three, and we come to forgive them for their shortcomings in earlier seasons. 

However, there is a key difference in the way these characters develop and “carry the season.” The directors give Adam more agency in his character arc, while the directors expect our sympathy for Ruby to draw from her relationships with men. Despite Sex Education’s feminist efforts to be inclusive of all identities, misogyny still pervades some of their plot lines—particularly Ruby’s.

However, there is a key difference in the way these characters develop and “carry the season.” The directors give Adam more agency in his character arc, while the directors expect our sympathy for Ruby to draw from her relationships with men. Despite Sex Education’s feminist efforts to be inclusive of all identities, misogyny still pervades some of their plot lines—particularly Ruby’s.

Adam’s Agency and Growth 

Adam starts out Season One as the school bully. He had an unhappy home life with a cold father. He would actually beat up his now-boyfriend Eric regularly until he realized and accepted his attraction for Eric. The directors offer up Adam’s complicated homelife and discomfort with his sexuality as an explanation for his outrage, and the directors hope we accept this explanation. Sex Education Season 3 was dangerously close to employing the toxic enemies-to-lovers trope and glorifying bullying. Remember Kurt Hummel and David Karofsky on Glee? Or, Mindy Krenshaw and Josh Nichols on Drake and Josh? But Sex Education’s deptiction of the bully turned romantic partner is slightly more thoughtful than these other shows. Alan Sepinwall writes in Rolling Stone,

 I’ve now mostly let go of my frustration that he [Eric] was paired off with Adam, who was introduced in Season One as a bully who relentlessly tormented Eric. Their stories this year, both together and apart, work very well. 

Overall, he overcomes his masculine outrage from Season One by accepting his identity as a gay man and working to grow as a person. Adam has our admiration, and we accept him with open arms. 

Fast forward two seasons later, and Adam comes across as an endearing young man with a kind heart. He cares deeply for his boyfriend Eric, writes him poetry, and tries harder in school. The fact that Eric forgives Adam helps us forgive him, too. And, if that doesn’t have audience members convinced, you can’t forget the scene where Eric does Adam’s makeup and Adam responds, “I look quite pretty.” Seeing Adam embrace femininity warms our hearts and seals the deal.

https://www.tiktok.com/@orenndaa/video/7009860869299391745?_d=secCgYIASAHKAESPgo8GdZDoe0SMGBEgZuG5agJ5YP1Ksu3cuvfKAhhBK0AH2WUBhI0Jw4JS%2Fgr0Og56Hkq%2FFV5fzERuAZwUZCxGgA%3D&checksum=e8e27a3d89fbfcfcfbff3bae689cefa10ade7c0082e4b6d0001c83bf72b2316a&language=en&preview_pb=0&sec_user_id=MS4wLjABAAAASxSFa7crZ5KemW4sElkBRlhFOJexCTh9h_4wqkZAkNK699ftTL8FmwbjKVGqGcDN&share_app_id=1233&share_item_id=7009860869299391745&share_link_id=BF9D53C4-02E7-436F-8904-1BC5A282B1D8&source=h5_m&timestamp=1634325947&tt_from=copy&u_code=dbeh9h56iejce5&user_id=6807594720920781830&utm_campaign=client_share&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=copy&_r=1

Like Sepinwall writes in Rolling Stone, the fact that Eric’s and Adam’s stories work “both together and apart” is a key element in Adam’s agency. He has a story outside of his boyfriend, and Adam puts in the effort to improve himself. He asks his teachers for help, practices sharing his feelings, etc. Overall, he overcomes his masculine outrage from Season One by accepting his identity as a gay man and working to grow as a person. Adam has our admiration, and we accept him with open arms. 

A Female Character’s Story Dependent on Men 

There’s another character that the directors clearly want us to sympathize with and accept—Ruby. Like Adam, Ruby also has a complex character arc. She’s one of the stereotypical popular, “mean girls” at school, and eventually the show presents her as an independent person that knows her worth. The directors want us to forgive Ruby like we did Adam. However, the directors don’t assign her agency as she grows as a character. Instead, her growth is contingent on her relationships with men.

Adam has a story “together and apart” from Eric. Ruby seems to only have a story “together” with Otis. The season opens by focusing on Otis and Ruby’s casual relationship. Ruby is embarrassed of her sexual relationship with him and spends much of Sex Education Season Three trying to change Otis—his behaviors, his clothing, etc. She is also standoffish about him going over to her house. The directors were purposeful in having the audience wait to find out why Ruby is acting this way.

“Tough Girl with a Soft Heart” Cliché 

Then, comes the “big reveal”—Ruby comes from a middle-class household, and her father has MS. How do the directors want us to feel about this? It seems like the directors are playing with a common trope: the beautiful, popular girl with a tough exterior has a secret to make us pity her—suddenly we see she has a heart. But in reality, living in a middle class household or having a close family member with an illness or disability is a normal thing. Why make her father’s experience central to her character? It seems like it should be more his story than hers. 

To make it worse, the directors seem to lose interest in Ruby’s character once Otis breaks up with her. She doesn’t really get a story of her own.

Immediately after this scene comes the vulnerable moment when Ruby tells Otis she loves him… and he doesn’t say it back. As much as we may feel for Ruby and her rejection, the directors over-emphasize her father’s role in this sympathy. They chose to place this scene directly after Otis meets Ruby’s father. As the directors imply, it is a big deal that she is sharing a secret part of her life with Otis, so we should feel even worse for Ruby. But I would argue that we should admire Ruby for other reasons—her confidence, her humor, and her ability to stand up to people. It’s a pity that the directors over-emphasize her relationships with men.

To make it worse, the directors seem to lose interest in Ruby’s character once Otis breaks up with her. She doesn’t really get a story of her own. We are expected to sympathize with her and move on. Her father’s disease and her relationship with Otis takes up too much space in her narrative.

Gender Differences in Character Arc 

@winterstxrk

best character development with them <3 #fyp #rubymatthews #adamgroff

♬ original sound – amber

It’s interesting that with Adam, we get to sympathize with his character for his personal struggles and his agency in overcoming them. For Ruby, the female character, we are expected to sympathize with her because of her association with men and their struggles. This pattern of giving male characters more agency than others is getting a bit old, don’t you think?

Sex Education did an amazing job in Season Three in its representation of all kinds of identities. We saw more non-binary representation, disabled individuals as love interests, and more. However, they fell a bit short when it came to Ruby’s character development. Let’s hope that if Season Four is in the works, the directors will give Ruby more space in the show’s narrative as she deserves.

A Sad Girl’s Love Song

by No Rules Cornell, posted in Creative, Featured, Poetry

by Leio Koga //

Slyvia Plath left a literary legacy behind her, although her story is quite the tragedy. Plath was a brilliant student but struggled with severe mental illnesses from a young age. By the time she was 30, Plath was well-known in the literary community. She was known for her confessional style of writing and poetry; her pieces were described to intensely portray her mental anguish, volatile emotional state, troubled marriage, poor self-image, and unresolved conflict with her parents. Plath wrote some of her most famous pieces, including, “Daddy,” “The Bell Jar,” and “The Colossus,” during the worst mental state of her life. She fell into a deep depression and committed suicide when she was only 31. 

I was exposed to the power of Plath’s words when I first read “Mad Girl’s Love Song” during my senior year of high school. This poem is about someone who is going through heartbreak and suffering from mental health issues. The poem, though very abstract, clearly depicts the dangers of living within one’s mind all the time, especially when one’s thoughts are clouded by heartbreak and pain. Plath draws on the idea of how romance is not romantic at all. The way Plath writes, love is empty, unfulfilling, and possibly, all in one’s head. While she wrote this poem when she was just 20 years old, I could clearly see her internal, emotional turbulence of heartbreak and unrequited love. I wanted to recreate this poem as a reflection of the anguish and pure sadness that her words made me feel. 

A Sad Girl’s Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead

Trapped in a vision of the infinite ocean

The vicious waves of your love I tread 

The breeze whispers like a lover, but I was only mislead 

I am the waves undeniably drawn back into your deep, perilous sea 

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead 

Your anger is a storm—fast but calamitous— I always dread

Each time I mend my broken pieces just for your disaster to strike me again 

And leave my soul in shreds

God topples from the sky, hell’s waves rise and crash, and I hang on by a thread

But the raft tips over and I thrash, sob, curse your name  

I wish I made you up inside my head 

I fell for the way your surface sparkled, but instead

Your love was the world of secrecy underneath it 

Chained to an anchor, darkness consumed me whole but still, for you, my heart bled 

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead

Trapped in a vision of the infinite ocean 

And at the bottom is where you are, on a throne created from my tears of pain  

I wish I made you up inside my head

The Evil Witch Inside Us

by No Rules Cornell, posted in Health & Wellness, Nonfiction, Opinion, Uncategorized

by Helen Zhang //

Look around your room. How many mirrors do you see? 

Now, if you did not include your phone, laptop, or other technology with screens, adjust your answer. 

Did your number change?

Mine certainly did. Personally, I have five mirrors in my bedroom alone. That fact shocks me. After all, like many 18 year-olds in this day and age, I have a love-hate relationship with mirrors. As a child, my mirror fascinated me. I spent quite a bit of time in front of it, making faces and laughing as the person in front of me smiled and giggled with me. But as I grew older, those faces froze in the reflection. I stopped making them, but my appearance still seemed off. I didn’t like it anymore, but I couldn’t step away.

Mirror Mirror on the wall, 

Tell me what are all my flaws. 

I recall reading fairy tales as a child. I read them at home, and we talked about them in school too. Everyone remembers the magical mirror that the evil queen had and how it told her that Snow White was prettier than her. In elementary school, we were taught that each fairy tale comes with a lesson. The lesson in Snow White was that beauty is not what you look like, but who you are inside. But that’s not all that I took away. The portrayal of the evil queen suggested that caring about your appearance was abnormal, a bad thing. 

It’s not. 

We all have that magic-looking glass. That’s what mirrors are. And while it may not be speaking to us aloud, that inner voice critiquing ourselves when we look at the mirror is the same thing. 

Technology had become a mirror itself, and though I resented it, I still couldn’t step away. I couldn’t step away, and I didn’t know why. I was becoming the evil queen from Snow White. 

So what happens when there’s a voice inside you telling you that you are not enough? We begin to see ourselves as the evil queen, someone obsessed with our appearance. As we get older, our relationship with mirrors becomes more complicated—especially as a girl. And yet, the more insecure we get, the more mirrors pop up in our life. The bathroom mirror that I used to quickly check my appearance was transformed into a full-length mirror that rejected every clothing choice I showed in front of it. That mirror then transformed into my phone, a portable device that allowed me to not only critique myself but have my image shared and critiqued by other people. Technology had become a mirror itself, and though I resented it, I still couldn’t step away. I couldn’t step away, and I didn’t know why. I was becoming the evil queen from Snow White. 

But why is that a bad thing? 

The stepmother needed to hear exactly what she wanted and from the source that she wanted. After being told that she was the most beautiful person, “[the queen] was contented, for she knew that the looking-glass spoke the truth.” How is that so different from the way we use social media? Like the evil queen, we seek approval from others to be content with ourselves. And when we hear critiques, we try to change something to get a different outcome. Filters and photoshop transform our reality to mold into the approved societal standard. But that rarely takes the voice away.

Some of my friends have taken breaks from social media, deleting apps from their phones to get away from the toxic environment. They tell me how refreshing it is. But I could never do that. And neither could the evil queen. She wanted to be the most beautiful person in the world, but all she heard from her mirror was that she was not enough. So she tried to change that result the only way she could think of–by getting rid of Snow White. The huntsman. The lace. The comb. The apple. The queen was obsessed with becoming beautiful, and every failed attempt to kill Snow White brought more anger and disappointment upon herself. I have felt that anger and disappointment countless times when I look in the mirror. 

She had an addiction—one that many of us can relate to. In addition to having insecurities about our image, we have to deal with the rest of society telling us that we shouldn’t have them. But those insecurities grow inside us like the “envy and pride like ill weeds” that made its home in the queen’s heart. Weeds grow uncontrollably, and you may think that you have gotten rid of all of them, but all it takes is one single sprout to have a full infestation.

I’m not trying to say that the queen was right in attempting to kill Snow White. She had an obsession; one that consumed her. But what we all need to know is that it is okay to care about your appearance.

I’m not trying to tell you how to deal with your insecurities. I’m not trying to say that the queen was right in attempting to kill Snow White. She had an obsession; one that consumed her. But what we all need to know is that it is okay to care about your appearance. Unlike the evil queen’s portrayal in Snow White, it is not villainous to want to be beautiful. It is what humanized her. There isn’t an easy solution to dealing with insecurities, and appearance is one of the most common ones out there. 

But we all have a little evil queen inside of us, and that’s okay. 

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am—Celebrating a Prominent Woman and Writer

by No Rules Cornell, posted in Movies & TV, Uncategorized

by Hanna Carney //

Morrison wants us to read, write, think, and reimagine our lives through a different perspective and find agency there.

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am recounts the life of Toni Morrison—Nobel-prize-winning writer, editor, and professor. The biopic is shaped by interviews with Morrison and her colleagues (such as Angela Davis and Oprah Winfrey) as they examine her life and accomplishments. Each interviewee paints Morrison as a thoughtful, striking black woman who knew how to move people. “Toni tells extraordinary stories that touch people in a very deep place,” says Walter Mosley. 

It is only appropriate that Morrison’s words helped build her own biopic, as few can be considered her peers in eloquence and charisma. Viewers get to witness Morrison’s formation as a writer through the retelling of her earliest memories. Morrison looks back fondly on her sister teaching her how to read when she was three years old. The two of them would write on the sidewalk with pebbles only to have their mother stop them for copying a word they had found down the street, which turned out to be “fuck”—“Expanding our vocabulary,” says Morrison with a smile. She remembers that while her mother was reprimanding them, that word on the sidewalk had not once passed her lips. “Ultimately, I knew that words have power.” 

When I came to this scene in the documentary, I thought, when did I understand the power of language? I’m sure I’m not alone in wishing I could’ve known Morrison, so she could have imparted some of her wisdom on me. I can’t help but be jealous of the students who had the privilege of taking her classes. Morrison advised her creative writing students at Princeton, don’t tell me about your “little life… I want you to invent.” In one of her interviews, Sonia Sanchez asserts that Morrison’s emphasis on reinvention calls us to “reimagine us on this American landscape.” We must ask:

“What I must do now. How I must live, how I must rearrange… my vowels. How I must rearrange my toe jam. How I must rearrange my hair, my breasts. How I must rearrange my thoughts.”

Morrison wants us to read, write, think, and reimagine our lives through a different perspective and find agency there. Perhaps, only when we do this thinking and reimagining can we understand the power of language. Morrison does feminist work in her writing and leaves the sentiment to be found in the language itself. In other words, she is not a feminist simply because she wrote black women at the center of her narratives, or because she worked to overcome the white male gaze. Toni Morrison is a feminist because she truly wrote. She invented. She reimagined.

Although The Pieces I am serves as a wonderful glimpse into the life of Toni Morrison, it is just that—a glimpse. One cannot truly appreciate her innovation and brilliance without reading her novels, without praying with Pecola in The Bluest Eye, or mourning with Sethe in Beloved. Nonetheless, The Pieces I am compels us to question what it means to write, to read, to think, and, ultimately, to inspire.

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am is available on Hulu, YouTube, and Vudu. The documentary can also be accessed online through Cornell’s Library.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8sUwXTWb4M&feature=emb_title