The Naked Citadel By Susan Faludi And Leslie Bell Essay

After reading the essays “The Naked Citadel”, selections from “Hard To Get” and from “Alone Together” by Susan Faludi, Leslie Bell, and Sherry Turkle, readers are presented with the idea of wants vs. needs. Ideally, a desire and a necessity in life should be clearly distinguishable, but that is not always the case in reality. For example, take an adult human being and a robot programmed to feel emotions. We as humans have a natural tendency to yearn for companionship and togetherness, for we are

seemingly contradictory desires at once…” (Bell,28). The concept of splitting is an especially useful one and it is discussed in Leslie Bell’s work, Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom. The reason splitting is a useful concept is that splitting helps to explain how people react to uncertainty specifically with regards to the drag queens and the cadets at the Citadel in Faludi's work The Naked Citadel, and Jayanthi and Alicia in Leslie Bell’s work Hard to get, however it

vulnerability to show through. Women, on the other hand, are encouraged to be strong, pursue their careers, and experiment with their sexuality. Although women are gaining power, they are still left with a feeling of confusion about themselves. Leslie Bell author of, “Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom”, reveals the idea of women experimenting sexually, but at the same time experiencing a sense of confusion and pressure to settle down and marry in their twenties

should act. Leslie Bell in her story, “Selections from Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom,” discusses how women nowadays have to adhere and alter their personalities to meet society’s new norms. Often women who try to change themselves experience “splitting”. Bell gives examples of women, her patients, who have dealt with “splitting” and talks about how they changed themselves to fit into society. Some ideas from Bell’s story can be related to Susan Faludi’s story

Similar to Stout, Leslie Bell also discovers the topic of psychological mechanisms in her Selection from Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom when women are given a paradox of sexual freedom by explaining how women split to create histories and identities for themselves. Bell’s patients, Jayanthi and Alicia, want to define themselves, but simultaneously face pressures from their family and society as to how they should act. Susan Faludi’s, “The Naked Citadel” explains the