Summary Of Hard To Get By Malcolm Gladwell

Kassandra Ferma English 101 Kathryn Goldstein 21 October 2014

Paper 3 (Final Draft): To Reconcile or Not to Reconcile; That is the Question!
In politics, there is no middle ground. Especially in America, there is a divide between left and right, liberal and conservative. This understanding of political behavior is also applicable to human behavior in the sense that there are always two polar extremes. The question is, can they be reconciled? In Leslie Bell’s Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom, the author discusses the “vying” cultural factors that influences a woman’s sex and love life in the twenty-first century world, while also defining a very distinct mindset that women acquire: splitting.
Therefore, splitting is not subject to compromisation. Malcolm Gladwell implies this concept of splitting in The Power of Context by elucidating that one’s immediate environment clouds decision-making processes. Gladwell’s position on the matter is antithetical to Bell’s, and provides a different description of this concept of splitting in that it is prevalent within men as well. Moreover, Susan Faludi in The Naked Citadel observes the way men in the academy arbitrarily treat women of the opposite sex, further reinforcing the notion that splitting is prevalent in not just women, or just men, but in all of humanity’s interaction with the world. Both Gladwell and Faludi help to better define Bell’s notion of splitting through their analysis of men and women in different situations, along with their behavioral responses to these situations. The end result of the works of all three authors is a cohesive understanding of splitting wherein humans who
Gladwell depicts the negative consequence of splitting through the Stanford mock prison experiment where prison guards split between their pacifist and non-pacifist methods of approaching a situation that incited their violence nature towards the prisoners. Bell depicts the negative consequence of splitting through Jayanthi who split between a good girl and bad girl person that consequently led to her perpetual confusion. Faludi displays the negative consequence of splitting through the men at the Citadel who split between a male-dominant environment and a female-dominant environment that ultimately paved the way for their aggressive behavior. All three authors indicate that splitting undoubtedly isolates one from one’s environment because individuals in each of the authors’ essays were caught up in deciding one extreme over the other rather than realizing that one can have the best of both