Blog Post #9

Donna Steiner’s “Sleeping with Alcohol” didn’t so much make me stereotype them as it did make me pity them. I mean, I suppose that the fact that I pictured the alcoholic woman as an Amy Winehouse looking creature, and as the reporter as a spineless entity , too afraid to assist in correcting a devastating behavior in the significant other.
I really don’t think this article was saying anything about stereotyping at all. I think it was trying (and failing) to say that there’s a certain beauty and courage in the things that society deems to be hideous and unmentionable. The only way that I could even pull that conclusion out of this work was the fact that throughout the whole paper, Steiner paints a morbid picture of a decrepit relationship in a home littered with bottle caps and inhabited by an alcoholic and a coward, then in the ending sentences, the words “Beautiful… I get out of bed and I take her hand”. These few little end notes to an otherwise dysfunctional article add the theme that there’s an underlying splendor that you couldn’t pick up on from glancing at the exterior details; that you would have to look inside the minds of the couple in order to really appreciate who they are.
And in that sense, I deduce that this article just may have been about stereotyping. In retrospect, I should have analyzed my opinion of the selection a little deeper before I began to write.
Yes, I did stereotype Steiner and Lee. My opinion of them didn’t really change in the end, because in the foremost paragraphs, I developed a pity for them, towards the center that pity changed to disdain, then by the time I got to the last paragraph, disdain had changed back to pity.