Defining an obscure or debatable concept: obscenity

When I first read the prompt for the third essay I was a bit confused as to what I should do as a topic, there were many ideas I had, but few that could be debatable. Then, I saw the prompt obscenity. I really liked this idea as a debatable concept because ever since I was young I thought obscene words and gestures were just that, words and gestures. Swearing in school is something I have always had a problem with, and argued heavily for the use of. To me, as long as there was no hatred behind the definition of the word, swearing was fine, and I had a very hard time understanding what the big deal was. In my everyday life I would say I would probably use one of those words in every other sentence. As for gestures, the one that I can think of as having the most ludicrous meaning would be "the finger". To me, it was your middle finger. That's it. Nothing to worry about, how could people get so hung up about it.

Lately there has been an issue over the word "retard". I use this word quite often, and when I use it, I don't generally think of someone who is mentally retarded when I use the word. The same could go for the word gay. Nearly everyone uses this word to describe things that are not homosexual whatsoever.

What I plan on doing is researching the origins of the words themselves and finding how they became known as "curse" words, and the impact they have had over the years. I also will be researching on how the FCC labels certain words more offensive than others.

I could also branch out even further and research obscene gestures besides the ones mentioned above, on people's conduct and what is considered obscene in the sense of the law.

Rhetorical Analysis and Evaluation

The topic that I would like to do my rhetorical analysis and evaluation on is the treatment of animals, as well as the topic of vegetarianism. This topic is very important to me, because I believe that if more people knew where their food was coming from they would either stop eating it, or at least make an effort to buy free range meat and poultry. The two sources I will be using for analysis will be a song by the band The Smiths, Meat Is Murder. A song that is obviously about the opinion that eating meat constitutes murder. The other source I plan on using will be a video, created by PETA and narrated by Alec Baldwin, the title of which is called Meet your Meat. I plan on comparing the two mediums, The Smiths song in how is employs the listener to be compassionate, where as the PETA video simply throws the brutal images into the viewers face. Overall I would say that the video is more effective because of the imagery it actually shows, while the song is more appealing because it does not have all of the gore, and because the song is actually quite good.
You can find the song by The Smiths, Meat Is Murder here.
And, you can find the video by PETA, Meet Your Meat here.

(The PETA video is very graphic)