Analysis Of Hard To Get: Twenty Something Women And The Paradox Of Freedom

Environment is a person 's surrounding conditions and circumstances at a specific time, which influences that person 's behavior. In selection from Hard to Get: Twenty Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom Leslie bell writes about how pressure from the environment shapes young women 's behavior and puts them in a contradictory position about their sexual rights. Pressure from community and society lead young women to splitting which results in unconsciously creating two or more distinct lifestyle and thinking that they can only choose one way or the other. Malcolm Gladwell in his essay The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City writes about how environment shapes an individual 's behavior and how it

Too much power or freedom causes an internal conflict of choices of lifestyle and eventually lead to splitting between pursuing goal versus taking the freedom to extreme. When the environment offers too much freedom or power, individual lose their identity and gets owned by the notion of freedom or power. The power of freedom have so much influence on individuals that sometime those powers dictate their wishes and choose the choices of lifestyle for them. Jayanthi, one of the interviewees of Bell, is from a conservative American-Indian family who had great pressure from her background and specially had to follow strict rules about sexual relation. However when she moved to college and say the light of freedom everything she valued had changed. Jayanthi said that “I’m just going to break them. So I just broke them. So I ended up really going crazy…I was just like “I don’t want to be the poster Child, so the other extreme is this.”, when she realizes that she had option to be free (Bell 33). Jayanthi was oppressed by the strict rules of her family and culture. So when opportunity of freedom came she was happy to embrace it. Although she had the freedom to follow her goals and dreams, however, the power of freedom was so much tempting that it led her to splitting. She had the option to choose the lifestyle she will enjoy or she can take her freedom to extreme. She decided to misuse her freedom and tried to go extreme in the lifestyle of a bad girl. Correspondingly, freedom of power can over power the will of being good. Gladwell writes about one of the guards, who said that “there were times when we were pretty abusive, getting right in faces and yelling at them” one guard remembers “ It was part of the whole atmosphere of terror”. As the experiment progressed, the guard got systematically crueler and more sadistic”(Gladwell 158). The freedom of power was so influential that the guard forgot his real identity and started to act like a real guard. The power led them to