The Idea of an Essay, Volume 3

80 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 3 Veiled Amelia Walker Amelia Walker is a Senior Electrical Engineering Major. When she isn’t dancing or solving Rubik’s Cubes, she enjoys writing short stories and essays on social issues. Thousands of Americans sit themselves in front of their televisions each evening, watching the nightly news, commercials and sappy soap operas. However, do viewers consider how the media could be affecting their view of others? In her essay Disability, Nancy Mairs exposes media’s negative effect on the perception of the physically disabled. She accomplishes this by relating her observations of media to her personal experience. As a woman who has multiple sclerosis, Mairs knows well the lack of any fair media portrayal of the physically disabled. She recounts seeing a show where a woman diagnosed with MS attempted to take a journey before the disease’s effects took over, only to be pursued and stopped by her young, love-struck doctor. The concept Mairs (2005) takes issue with is that the show took the disease and made it the “determining factor of a woman’s existence” (p. 221). It seems that the show did little to indicate the woman character, hobbies or interests outside of the over-arching knowledge that she was now disabled. As detrimental as this kind of disease is, it does not “devour one wholly” (Mairs, 2005, p. 221). Even so, the depiction on the show completely defined the woman by her disease, encouraging viewers to do the same. Commercials tend to show the ideal; handsome men, cute little girls and the perfect American white-picket-fence homes are the stars of today’s advertisements. It is extremely rare to see a disabled person selling a consumer product on television. Mairs believes this is so because advertisers do not want disabilities to appear normal, or rather, something that “may enter anybody’s life” (2005, p. 221). People gravitate towards what is known, comfortable or ideal; to depict a product used by the disabled would be to assert