About Men Essay Analysis

Gretel Ehrlich wrote this essay to illustrate the wrong stereotype that people have for cowboys and try to dissolve the wrong stereotype by telling her own experiences living in Wyoming and interacting with cowboys. Her main idea is that cowboys are not who the movies usually depict them, tough, lonely individualist; instead, they are “convivial, quirky and softhearted” and are selfless and have compassion.
Ehrlich uses personal stories which appeal to ethos. When she talks about how a cowboy loves his job and how hard the job is, she uses specific examples and imagery to back up her point that being a cowboy is not an easy job and they have passions on their work. She uses a real-life example of her friend trying to save the horse from drowning, “dove under water and cut her legs loose with a knife, then swam her to shore, his arm around her neck lifeguard-style”. She depicts the situation vividly and shows how her friend saves the horse through the image she creates. By using a real-life example, it backs up Ehrlich’s point that cowboys do love their jobs even though they need to work “ten to fifteen hours a day and the pay is $30″ and it also shows their courage is “selfless, a form of compassion”. It makes her argument more reliable because the story truly happened. This example helps to prove the point that cowboys are not rigid and don’t have emotions as the media depicts; instead, they treat animals like their families and risk their lives to save it. And also, even though their jobs are hard and they make little money for it, they still love their jobs.
I do agree with Ehrlich’s point that we have many wrong stereotypes for different groups of people even though we are not even familiar with them. Many people are influenced by the media and form a false stereotype of certain groups of people. For example, people asked me if I know kungfu since I’m Chinese because they have seen many movies of Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. Therefore, people formed a wrong stereotype of Chinese under the influences of media. I believe that we need to get to know people on our own, not through media or other people, because it may not always be true like Ehrlich illustrates in her essay about the wrong stereotype of cowboys.