Opinion
SHOHAM GEVA
EDITOR IN CHIEF
CLAIRE BRYAN
AND REGAN DETWILER
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS
LAURA SCHINAGLE
MANAGING EDITOR
420 Maynard St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
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4 — Friday, February 12, 2016
I
nterrupting our scene, my act-
ing teacher put her hand on my
shoulder and looked me in the
eyes. Soft, yet
affirmatively,
she told me to
“park politeness
at the door.”
“Get out of
your
head,”
she
demanded.
“Don’t
think
about your reac-
tion and don’t
manipulate your
response;
just
express the feel-
ing that comes naturally to you.”
Feeling very uncomfortable and
utterly lost, I stood on the stage
rubbing the inside of my palms. It
was hopeless; I didn’t know what to
say, or the right way to say it.
Our class was learning the Meis-
ner approach to acting, where the
name of the game is to express
authentic emotion during an impro-
visation by recalling your own feel-
ings and experiences. Through a
series of repetition exercises, we
were supposed to learn how to react
honestly to our partners’ expressed
emotion rather than focusing on
the lines that we were exchang-
ing. For example, if my partner said
something that made me anxious,
I would say aloud to him, “You’re
making me uncomfortable.”
As I stood helpless in front of the
class, I was saved by yet another
interjection by my teacher. “Tell-
ing someone what you’re actually
feeling is hard, isn’t it?” The entire
class nodded in agreement. “In our
culture, we’re so focused on being
polite that we’re afraid to express
our feelings. We create so many
miscommunications by being afraid
to be emotionally connected with
another person.”
After she said this, I started to
reflect on my relationships. Even
though I had only known my act-
ing partners in the class for a few
weeks, I already felt more connect-
ed to them than to friends that I had
known for months.
Initially, I was worried about
how much I would actually enjoy
this class. Being a person diagnosed
with generalized anxiety disor-
der, I have difficulty with public
speaking. I could barely give class
presentations, let alone channel my
innermost feelings to share openly
with a class of 16 strangers. But to
my surprise, by the end of my scene,
the unexpected happened.
Instead of provoking stress, the
activity lessened my stress tre-
mendously. As weird as it sounds,
it actually felt great to show com-
plete vulnerability to a stranger. I
hadn’t noticed it before, but after
that scene, I realized that I had
been suppressing my emotions in
order to accommodate others, and
that my suppression of emotion
had been worsening my symptoms
of anxiety. Sincerely exposing my
feelings to my peers unexpect-
edly eased the restlessness and
worry that normally overtook me
in social interactions.
Western culture has taught us
that it’s abnormal to express emo-
tion. We live in a society where men
have been conditioned to believe
that suppressing their emotions
makes them more masculine, and
where the expression of emotional
pain by women has been discour-
aged. It’s unfair that our culture
has diminished this sense of our
humanity. Even though a lot of
people experience a pressure to
conceal their emotions, people with
generalized anxiety disorder and
other emotional disorders, such as
clinical depression or other mood
disorders, can be more devastating-
ly affected by the pressure to create
a façade.
People with generalized anxiety
disorder are more likely to suppress
their emotions because they are
more worried that their emotions
are unacceptable or inappropriate.
There have been times when I’ve
been so worried to show my emo-
tions that my concern has caused
me physical pain in the form of
chest discomfort and loss of breath.
In general, this burden is attributed
to the development of diseases and
physical ailments in people with
high levels of anxiety. Improper
emotional regulation through lack
of expression also makes it harder
for individuals to communicate
effectively. This leads to miscom-
munications and can result in the
inability to recognize the emotions
of others.
Interestingly enough, none of
my health care providers warned
me about these behaviors and
their negative consequences to
my health. I have been in and out
of different health systems and I
have met with multiple doctors
from diverse areas of expertise, but
none of them suggested regulating
emotional expression to help alle-
viate my anxiety. Instead, they all
strongly recommended different
types of medications. I finally gave
in, and I tried one medication after
another. When the medications
were not effective, my health care
professionals urged me to increase
the dosage. Needless to say, that
didn’t work, so instead they encour-
aged me to try creatively concocted
cocktails of antidepressants. Unfor-
tunately, none of these methods
proved to be helpful.
After experiencing overwhelm-
ing anxiety relief from emotional
verbalization, I realized I had
found my alternative to anti-anxi-
ety drugs. I wish I had known that
communicating
effectively
and
taking the time to connect with
others would boost my serotonin
levels as much as the little white
pill that I took every day. I’m not
saying there is a better alternative
to medication for everyone, but I
think that having open and hon-
est dialogue regularly is beneficial
for the improvement of emotional
well-being.
The real kicker is that, in our
society, it’s becoming more abnor-
mal for a person to show they feel
something than it is for them to
feel nothing at all or to mask their
feelings. It’s considered an insult
to be described as an emotional
individual. As a nation, we need to
start doing a better job at acknowl-
edging our humanity by dimin-
ishing our capitalist culture and
disregarding the idea that we don’t
have time for feelings because
we’re so busy with work. In addi-
tion to this, we need to address the
emotional detachment that often
comes in the form of competitive
nature. We need to reverse the dis-
cernable loss of empathy for the
betterment of mental and physical
health of people with and without
generalized anxiety disorder or
other emotional disorders.
—Hannah Maier can be reached
at hannamai@umich.edu.
Acting away anxiety
E-mail yazmon at Eyazmon@umich.Edu
YAZMON ECTOR
Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Caitlin Heenan, Jeremy Kaplan, Ben Keller,
Minsoo Kim, Payton Luokkala, Kit Maher, Madeline Nowicki, Anna
Polumbo-Levy, Jason Rowland, Lauren Schandevel, Melissa Scholke,
Kevin Sweitzer, Rebecca Tarnopol, Ashley Tjhung, Stephanie Trierweiler,
Hunter Zhao
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS
O
ne sleepy morning during my sopho-
more year of high school, my teacher
posed a question to the class that has
lingered in the back of my
mind ever since: “Which
are more valuable to soci-
ety: the sciences or the
arts?”
I remember most of the
kids in my class answered
science without hesita-
tion. I had much more
trouble
producing
an
answer, but I settled on
arts partially to be devil’s
advocate
and
partially
because I couldn’t imag-
ine a world without art or music or books.
Last week, I attended Dick Costolo’s talk
about leadership and liberal arts, which
reminded me of this age-old argument. Cos-
tolo, former CEO of Twitter and a University
of Michigan LSA computer science alum, pin-
pointed exactly how I feel about the role of
humanities in education.
As a student who has a deep interest in both
biology and English, I’ve found that I straddle
a gray area few students choose to traverse.
Even though I’m passionate about both the
sciences and the arts, I’ve had trouble articu-
lating to my peers exactly why I value taking
humanities courses (except for the fact that
writing well is an important skill, or that I
personally like how the two disciplines exer-
cise different parts of my brain, and that I’d be
bored if I only took science and math classes).
Many of my STEM-focused peers lament
the humanities distribution requirements
they have to fulfill for graduation. These
courses seem to eat up valuable credits that
could be used to take another science or math
course, one that teaches skills more pertinent
to their major or desired career. But when
students studying the humanities lament the
science distribution requirement, they’re met
with incredulity that they would spurn such
“essential” topics in education.
While Costolo implored students to take
computer science courses due to their appli-
cability in the global economy, he also noted
that nearly every discipline — sciences and
humanities alike — teaches students critical
thinking skills. He argued that what sets the
critical thinking in humanities subjects apart
from that in STEM subjects is that they teach
us what to think about.
That is, the critical thinking in the human-
ities requires the consideration of multiple
perspectives and factors that contextualize a
problem before attempting to solve it.
In the science and math classes I’ve taken
throughout my schooling, I’ve found little room
for varying perspectives or methods in course-
work. Sure, there may be several approaches
to a given problem, but thought processes are
often restricted by the single correct answer
that lies at the end of each question. Much of
the context of science is stripped in practice —
we’re usually forced to work within a set of con-
trols or a finite set of mathematical theorems.
Of course, science has room for concep-
tual and abstract discussions, but it still lacks
the interpersonal aspect integral to thought
in the humanities. And these interpersonal
skills often are more important in a career
than technical skills.
The humanities courses I’ve taken encour-
age the accumulation of disparate viewpoints
in conversation to strengthen a student’s inter-
personal skills. More often than not, it’s per-
fectly OK if a student takes away something
different from a text than the next student, so
long as they derive their reasoning from a rel-
evant source. The humanities force students
to sift through countless details to find what’s
important, to become adept listeners, to con-
sider experiences outside their own.
We need the humanities to serve as a liaison
between the world of science and the world
of human interaction, to check the power of
science and to force the scientific world to
consider the ethical and interpersonal rami-
fications of scientific advancements. Know-
ing how to draw a curved-arrow mechanism
for a bimolecular substitution reaction can-
not teach a doctor to empathize with patients
of different backgrounds than their own.
Knowing how to take the line integral of a
function cannot help engineers develop tech-
nologies that consider a community’s needs.
If we study science for science’s sake alone,
we run the risk of endangering humanity
itself. Life-prolonging medications, artificial
intelligence and genetic engineering are all
significant marks of human achievement, but
if used with the wrong intentions, they most
certainly have the potential to destroy soci-
eties and render life intolerable. The good
science can do for us resides in our consider-
ation of how these developments will shape
human life and interpersonal interactions in
the long term — and this is simply not some-
thing taught in most STEM courses.
Yet students don’t flock to STEM courses
purely out of interest, but rather pragmatic
concerns. College, after all, is a financial
investment, and it certainly is reasonable to
want a return on that investment. There is no
dearth of jobs in STEM fields, and often these
fields lead to lucrative careers — ones that
can pay off college debt and allow students to
earn comfortable livings post-graduation.
But for students to boil down which class-
es they take to the market value of the skills
taught, they forgo classes that can teach
them empathy or ethics or effective commu-
nication — skills that possess value that has
no price. Costolo — who made Twitter the
booming social media company it is today —
emphasized that his company would not have
been as successful as it is without the skills he
learned from the humanities courses he stud-
ied here at the University.
Society will perpetually juggle the influenc-
es of the sciences and the arts in our everyday
lives. Students can — and should — choose the
field that makes them burn with passion, but
they cannot dismiss the interconnectedness
of the sciences and the arts and the value that
each can contribute to their education, their
career and their character.
Life, after all, is so much more than a dis-
crete set of scientific and mathematical truths.
—Rebecca Tarnopol can be
reached at tarnopol@umich.edu
Keep humanity in education
E
veryone gives me more
or less the same reaction
when I tell them my celeb-
rity
crush
is
Seth
Rogen.
I’m
always
met with faces
of pure shock
and
disbelief,
followed
by
a
chorus
of
questioning as
to why. If I’m
really lucky, I
get
hysterical
laughter.
Seth
Rogen
doesn’t
have a six-pack, and he’s far from
the typical definition of “tall, dark
and handsome.” He’s short if you’re
not into guys under six foot and a
little pale, but I truly find him ador-
able. His, for lack of a better term,
“doughy” body doesn’t put me off.
If anything, I find him more attrac-
tive for it. He seems less unobtain-
able. He seems more real.
The reaction I get quite obvi-
ously means I’m supposed to fall
over myself for celebrities like the
Hemsworth brothers or Channing
Tatum. If I said I didn’t find them
attractive I’d be lying. Their chis-
eled bodies and sharp jawlines are
nice to look at and all, but they’re
entirely too intimidating. I’d never
be able to talk to any of them in real
life. But I think we’ve established I
can’t talk to men in general so that’s
not saying much.
The thing about crushes that
people tend to forget is that they
are supposed to be based on more
than looks. There’s a difference
between finding someone attrac-
tive and having a crush on them. I
find many men attractive. I sure as
hell wouldn’t date all of them. Sure,
pretty men may be dreamy in their
own right but that doesn’t mean
other men aren’t.
We’re constantly barraged with
discussion
surrounding
unreal-
istic beauty ideals women face
every day. The same goes for men
as well. We don’t think it’s fair of
men to compare us to Victoria’s
Secret models so why would we
compare them to Calvin Klein mod-
els? What kind of message are we
sending when we fawn over the
airbrushed men while completely
disregarding others we deem not
fitting as an ideal male? I’m not try-
ing to downplay women’s struggles
with body image, as there are sig-
nificantly more women who suffer
from body image issues; however, it
should be recognized that while we
grapple with how thin our bodies
are, 18 percent of adolescent males
struggle with wanting to be bigger
or more muscular.
Those kinds of men are few and
far between anyway — with only 1
to 2 percent of men having the ide-
alized body type, it’s as unrealistic
to expect abs on a guy as it is to
expect a woman to have a 20-inch
waist. Most of us are going to end
up marrying the Seth Rogens of the
world. It shouldn’t be a bad thing to
be attracted to “normal” men. I’m
not saying every other man isn’t
normal. It’s just that Hollywood is
full of unusually beautiful people;
that’s why they make a ridiculous
amount of money by having their
picture taken or starring in films.
It shouldn’t be everyone’s auto-
matic reaction to scoff at my choice
of celebrity crush. But it is. “Why
Seth Rogen when there are so many
more hot men to choose from?”
people have asked.
You see, I’m crushing hard
because not only is he hilari-
ous, but also Seth cares deeply
about social issues. He addressed
Congress two years ago in an
attempt to raise awareness about
the lack of Alzheimer’s funding.
His mother-in-law has suffered
from Alzheimer’s for almost 11
years and he has made big bounds
to help. Seth and his wife began
Hilarity for Charity, a foundation
to make Alzheimer’s advocates
out of millennials. They hold the
Los Angeles Variety Show to raise
money and awareness for the dis-
ease. It is the sweetest thing. He’s
a man of substance with aspira-
tions and a solid dedication to his
wife and their relationship.
As young girls we’re primed to
want to find our “Prince Charm-
ing” and he’s usually portrayed as
the old Ken-doll-like man who has
a perfectly symmetrical face and
not an inch of fat anywhere on his
body. Now there is a “curvy Ken”
to match his new “curvy Barbie,”
so we’re making moves toward
body peace.
Still, the “men of our dreams”
have no substance. They don’t run
charity events nor do they have
ambition. We’re brainwashed into
thinking these empty shells of
humans are worthy of our time.
For men, it’s more or less the
same except they often get their
ideas of ideal women from porn and
half-naked models on the pages of
magazines. Long cellulite-free legs,
flowing lustrous hair and blemish-
free faces bombard their psyches on
a daily basis, leading to disappoint-
ment for some when it’s usually not
the case in real life.
We should all aspire to be more
cognizant of who we admire. It’s
definitely OK to look at a celebrity
and appreciate their beauty, but
putting them on a pedestal is far
from necessary. How about we all
just agree that we don’t have to be
exceptionally beautiful to be of any
worth to one another?
Olivia Puente can be reached
at opuente@umich.edu
Real men have curves, too
OLIVIA
PUENTE
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REBECCA
TARNOPOL
HANNAH
MAIER