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The Naked Britadel By Susan Faludi Summary

1228 Words5 Pages

Staci Alfaro
Expository Writing 101
Rough Draft # 2
Catherine Kupiec
25 September 2014
Finding Your Way through Situations Society has always stated to have faith in justice and equality to all. In Susan Faludi’s short story “The Naked Citadel,” she discovers the central problems with sexuality among an all-male military academy. This masculine mindset is challenged by Shannon Faulkner who applied to and was granted access to the academy. However, she did not mark her gender declaring whether she was female, which in turn led to a very notorious court case. Dr. Leslie bell is a sociologist and psychotherapist, who is an expert in women’s development and sexuality. She is also the author of Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox …show more content…

The cadets at the Citadel “envision its military tradition above all (Faludi 79).” The cadets will always have to obey whatever the school said, no matter what it was. That was the tradition and that is what the school had envisioned. The cadets did not have an option to try and break free from this mold because that would be breaking tradition. It was something that could not be done. Equally, Alicia did not want to fall into the traditional mold of having a teen pregnancy. Using the good-girl strategy to solve this problem, lead her to her problems. She simply felt unsure and insecure. “Alicia’s rebellion was to succeed academically and to be different from her family. In some ways Alicia’s family molded her into being a good girl as noted, she was raised Catholic, and her father [forbade] her from dating in high school (Bell 37).” Her whole life Alicia was trying to fit into this mold her family had implanted her since her childhood. There was no way of escaping it. Instead of facing reality of her desires and what she wanted to do, the truth was Alicia was not ready to do any of it. Instead the right thing to do was try and fit into this traditional mold. In the long run she tried this good-girl rebel, which in the end resulted with nothing good. The cadets and Alicia only options were to fit into this frame that their family and society had presented them with. If they had tried to evade this then there would’ve been consequences. It was imply easier to fall into the mold and be one of the rest. Making society and their families happy but never truly facing the realities of the real world they lived

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