Nerd Think

The essay Pink Think, by Lynn Peril describes the image people have of women. It gives the reader the idea that girls and women are a very delicate dish-and-clothes-washing, cooking, cleaning, baby-making machine. This idea has been around for a long time, and many people still believe it to be the foundation of “womanhood”. I personally do not believe this theory to be correct, and Lynn did not try to argue against it. Some people still try to practice Pink Think, but it is not so popular anymore in our modern world. All the changes in technology made it almost impossible for women to stay home and clean. Pink Think is just one more of those annoying theories that label certain stereotypes.
Nowadays most women work outside of home in jobs that most people would have considered masculine at one point. It is true that some more conservative couples try to keep Pink Think alive by having the man working and the woman staying home with the kids, but less and less people are doing that every day. Most women today go to college and choose a career to follow, which is the complete opposite of Pink Think. Many women today are lawyers, professional athletes, singers, dancers, doctors, accountants, owners of companies, and others that would take pages to list. Nowadays we are not only housewives anymore. There are many men out there that depend on their wife's income to provide for their families. In fact, there are many single mothers that do just fine without the help of a men (not that I support divorces, but you get the point). Pink Think is a labeling idea that thankfully is not so popular anymore, however, many people still think of women in the Pink Think way. I just hate it when my brothers tell me that I have to clean the house because I am a girl and that is a girl's job. Thanks to Pink Think many other girls have to do things guys would not do because they believe that Pink Think really is a girl's guidelines.
Another example of an annoying theory would be Nerd Think. For some reason everyone believes that people who get really good grades are nerds. It is also believed that nerds wear geeky clothes, read, and study all day. For me, this theory is just as annoying as the Pink Think. Nerd Think influences people to label others as nerds. For example, my older brother always calls me a nerd just because I am a straight A student. This gets me really mad sometimes. I don't sit at home and read all day, and , hopefully, my clothes are not geeky! I do not even know how I get really good grades, it is just natural. The teacher explains something and I understand. There is nothing to it. I also don't study a lot the night before a test, I just look over my notes right before I take it. Obviously, when the test is really hard I study a little and try to memorize some things, but I don't spend hours on it. I don't even like to talk about grades with other people because they will just label me like my brother does. The problem is that I got so used to A's and I think a B would be a bad grade. However, most of my friends think that a B would be a miracle. That is why I don't like to talk about grades; if I am upset about a B they will already call me a nerd.
These were some of the reasons why I do not like these labeling ideas. A woman can be a stay-at-home wife, but that does not mean that her life was produced for that one purpose. A student can get straight As just because they do, and not because they live to study. Hopefully humans will forget about labeling stereotypes and just let people live the way they want without giving them names and telling them what they are based on their actions.

The witch of Portobello

This book written by Paulo Coelho, a Brazilian writer, is about Athena, a young women that, after divorcing her husband, searches for the meaning of her life. She gets involved in many different rituals and learns many different ways to worship "the Mother", which for her, and some other people, is a "female form of God". She gets in touch with the Mother by belly-dancing, doing calligraphy, and having rituals. By the end of the book she starts to teach others about her ways of life, and ends up being murdered because of the controversy she brought up.
This book is not written as a narrative, instead, the writer interviwed many people who closely knew Athena and published what they had to say about her. I personally found the Witch of Portobello to be a very insulting book because it constantly states that God is far away, up in the sky just telling us what to do. In some ways it reveals witchcraft, and some actions, which I believed to be Satanism, just as the towns people believed it to be at the time. I wouldnt recommend this book to a friend, and I also did not like the ending very much, even if it was a true story...