'Reading Lolita In Tehran,' The Mega-Marketing Of Depression In Japan?

Ethan Watters and Michael Moss express two separate pieces of literary works that display different scenarios, but express the same message. Watters sets forth a phenomenon in which an entire culture is modified for the better of industry in Japan. With this circumstance, Watters argues that the ‘total environment’ in which a demographic is set can be altered by the influence of outside sources. Moss relates a similar example, where a certain group is marketed to, and as a result, this group’s relationship with the product drastically increases. There are many differences in the two works, but both researches contain many similarities; marketing techniques, ethical views, etcetera. The main thing that is most common in both texts is type

Mernissi starts off her essay with story about a saleswoman telling her that she is too big for anything the store sold and that the “norm” is a size 4 or a size 6. All the magazines in America show skinny women who barely weigh a pound and look so young, which shows that the Western man wants “... to freeze female beauty within an idealized childhood, and forces women to perceive aging,” (255). Mernissi compares the weapon used against women in the West as declaring youth as beauty and to criticize maturity, and in the East as limiting access to public space. The serious approach Mernissi uses shows how personal her examples are and creates a big effect on the “weapons” used on

In Ethan Watters’ essay, “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan,” he has a discussion with Dr. Laurence Kirmayer regarding Kirmayer’s invitation to the International Consensus Group on Depression and Anxiety. In their discussion Kirmayer talks about how the basis of his invitation was on the notion that he as the director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill could add to the answer the large pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline was looking for. The question at hand was how culture influences the illness experience, but more specifically how depression is influenced by culture in Japan. If the conference was a success, the company would be able to enter and expand into a market worth billions of dollars. The reason that the cultural aspect of depression was very important was because in countries like Japan, the American conception of depression was taken as a more serious illness, rivaling heights of diseases like schizophrenia. The company hoped that by somehow changing the Japan’s perception of the illness from being something social or moral to the American conception where expressing the illness to others is considered being strong person rather than being a weak one, that their drug Paxil would be able to sell to the market, which is where the scientific and economic aspects of depression come into effect. The scientific and economic aspects take place due to the intentions of the company to sell the drug, and the drug’s ability to help

Culture is known to be able to shape the beliefs of a society through its language. The term “depression” for example, was not commonly used due to the impression that depression was not psychological, but rather more physical. This is because the people of Japan were able to find ways to avoid giving in to the feeling and moving on with their lives. In Ethan Watters’ “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan”, Watters looks into how pharmaceutical companies attempted to change the concept of depression in Japan in order to create a market to sell their antidepressant drugs. He discusses how the Japanese culture was influenced by the companies that were selling the drugs by imposing western beliefs on Japan, which would result in the

Accepting environments on the other hand, allow for the creation of imagination and personal connections. Nafisi in her “Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran” speaks about the creation of her reading group, and provides the type of education she desired to provide as an educator but was restricted to provide based on the Iranian regime. The Iranian society oppresses against women, forcing them to conform to societal norms. On the other hand, Nafisi introduces her students to a fantasy like environment during their literature class. This allows for the connection amongst the girls and Nafisi to be personal. The idea of connection can be done while making a comparison between the women in Iran and characters within a novel Nafisi discussed with her students. Nafisi states:

In this rapidly globalizing world, the jobs of the advertisers and marketers are to make sure we, the general public, have no control over our wants and desires. However, it is impossible for them to gain full control, but they do a good job of restricting what freedoms we do have. Big companies want us to believe that we have control by changing cultural norms without us realizing they did. Ethan Watters discusses how marketers plan to redesign Japanese culture for their benefit in his narrative titled “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan.” Watters makes it clear big companies, such as the drug company GlaxoSmithKline, are reshaping Japanese culture to market a pill that supposedly cures depression. Society is constantly changing and companies are able to take advantage of that by prompting the route in which society chooses to take. Large companies practice this style of marketing everywhere in the world and they are successful in influencing us, the general public. Big companies are considered big because consumers continuously buy their products, a lot of which are unnecessary. Their success brings light to the fact that we may believe that we have control, but it is just an illusion.

When many aspects of a woman life are controlled for her and she can no longer make decisions for herself, she becomes a slave to her oppressor. Throughout the class, the theme of women being controlled by other oppressing forces, can be seen in many texts. Women have their decisions made for them in terms of their, food intake, appearances, and lifestyle choices. These ideas are seen in Beyond the Lights, where Noni’s mother Macy both what Noni eats as well as how she looks. Again in “The Gilded Six Bits,” Missie May’s hunger and food intake are controlled and judged by Joe, who believes because he is a working man, his hunger is more important. In Color Stories: Black Women and Colorism in the 21st Century, society controls women’s appearances by pressuring them to look a certain way to be considered beautiful. In both Not That Kind of Girl and Borderlands: La Frontera, women’s decisions about their bodies in a sexual manner are controlled by the pressures of men. Oppressing forces play such a strong role in so many of the texts covered in class this semester, it makes one wonder if this oppression and forceful control is an accurate representation of our society today.

Over time humans have developed different methods for coping with hardships. Humor was developed as a way to cope with stressful situations or sadness. Art provided a way for people to escape the harsh reality they lived in to one of their own creation. The Escapism Movement in America following the Great Depression shows how people will take to various forms of art to distract themselves from the harsh reality of their situation. In Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, the characters find outlets from their war-torn country through the use of comedy and several artistic mediums. From Deshi and Maali’s use of humor to cope with the duress of the hospital to Khassan’s lifelong work on his novel, the character’s in this novel

A majority of us squander our time fantasizing about a faultless society, a place where sorrow has not meaning but is replaced with harmony, compassion, and riches. Essentially, we want a place where dreams come true. On the contrary, how often do we reflect on the worst? A place where sorrow is the only meaning and harmony, compassion and riches have no existence. Susceptibility, combat and abhorrence- the contemplation of our future. Glimpses of these are shown through demoralizing literature, where the dire stuff is an extrapolation of our world.

Human beings are greatly restricted by sociocultural background. In individuals’ lives, they consciously or unconsciously share sociocultural assumptions about normal behavior and alternatively are restricted to these assumptions, by following the disciplines of their culture, raising their social caste based on social norms, and behaving properly according to their social surroundings. These assumptions about normal behavior contain not only sociocultural expectations of proper behavior, but also sociocultural morality and the law. During individuals’ growth, they pick up these assumptions from family members, schools, peers, public media, or other sources as an important knowledge of their culture and life. However, these assumptions are not absolutely right and can change along with time as well as cultural transformation. Ethan Watters in his essay “The Mega-Marketing of Depression”, mentions his research of the Japanese and other Asian countries’ understanding and acceptance of depression. He wonders why these countries are different from the United States when facing the problem of depression. In “Son”, Andrew Solomon describes his growth as a gay and talks about parental influence on children’s self-acceptance of own identity. And Karen Armstrong in her essay “Homo Religious”, points out that religion in effect is a cultural way that human beings try to understand their life from a transcendent direction. Three authors in their context imply how sociocultural

Both men and women are faced with the cultural strains of gender norms. Although one can sympathize for both genders, historically speaking, women have faced significantly more repercussions. In Amy Tan’s, Two Kinds, the theme of feminine oppression is represented by the symbolism of the song in which the main character, Ni kan, must recite as a child. The song she recites is called “Pleading Child” and she only realizes that the song has a second half called “Perfectly Contented” until adulthood. The two contrasting pieces of music represent the defiance of women to standards of femininity set by the patriarchy. This is showcased by the relationship between Ni kan and her mother who symbolize women living in a patriarchal society and the patriarchy itself, respectively. Moreover, their relationship reflects the oppression of women by the ideologies of; undermining a woman’s value, denying a woman’s choice and the disagreement between the sexes.

‘Submission’ and ‘rebellion’ are two main topics in women’s sufferings in literature that highlights women’ entangled desire which causes her to perform her role in a male dominated society. "The Wide Wide World” by Susan Warner and “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs reveals the power relations between men and women, captor and captive, master and slave, are unstable and subject to think. I examine here how these narratives deal with their circumstances from childhood to adulthood. Both of these narratives suffer to survive. They adjust in their exotic foreign place from childhood to adulthood. The main focus of this paper is how each of these texts negotiates issues of power and powerlessness, race, gender, region, and historical moment.

Tragedies occur every day around the world. Just as it seems, hearing of the tragedies may be overwhelming to listen to because there are so many occurrences to keep track of. In the essay “The Girl Effect,” Nicholas D. Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn are journalists who relocated to China from the U.S. to pursue their careers. They come to find out about how neglected we’ve been to certain quotidian cruelties that take place in foreign counties specifically relating to the unfair treatment of women and girls. In this essay “On Habit,” Alain de Botton may refer to this blindness as a “home mindset” where we pay very little detail of what surrounds of because we’ve become habituated to the everyday occurrences. Kristof and WuDunn write their essay in order to expose those quotidian cruelties certain cultures have become habituated in their home mindsets. De Botton might have suggested inheriting a “travelling mindset” for those people who lived in the cultures where the tragic cruelties and are stuck in their home mindsets. A travelling mindset includes integrating receptivity which is the main difference between a home mindset and a travelling mindset. We are blind to the many tragedies that occur in foreign countries and our own because we have become habituated to our social norms that we find no reason to publish what we see as “the obvious”. Journalists can help expose those quotidian cruelties that occur every day by adopting travelling mindsets to reveal certain

In both of the historical events above, a great many people faced trauma, pain, starvation, disease, and all for a reason that is difficult, if not impossible to pinpoint. There is no way to determine why either situation occurred in history, but it is possible to examine the literature—more specifically the poetry—written during, after, and about those surreal events. Kali Tal has researched the literature of trauma extensively and states that the “literature of trauma is defined by the identity of its author [and it] holds at its center the reconstruction and recuperation of the traumatic experience” (16). She believes that a

“Reading Lolita In Tehran: A Memoir In Books” chronicles the life of Azar Nafisi, (a Professor of English), during her years in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The novel documents Nafisi’s experiences while teaching during the Iranian Revolution in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and her life there until abandoning her home for America in 1997. Much of the book focuses on Nafisi as a professor at the University of Tehran, and, (after her expulsion from there), the Allameh Tabatabai University. Nafisi begins telling her story by sharing with the reader a specific dream that finally came true for her in her last years of teaching in Iran: to hold a private literature workshop with a select group of dedicated female students.