the most gendered list of all time.
http://www.discoverfun.com/freeinfo/500fun/friends.html.
bridgett mccoy concurs.
Gender101@Bowdoin
RSSNews Article on Abortion…
Do you think the mother’s anger was in any way justified?
Banning Beauty Ads: Yes? No?
Earlier on in the semester, we discussed Naomi Wolf’s article “The Beauty Myth”. We focused on one specific argument that Wolf made: how the concept of ‘beauty’, a social construct in and of itself, reinforces male institutions and male dominance over women. (See also Jean Kilbourne’s article, “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising”)
I found this article online and thought it would raise a fascinating discussion. What do you think about beauty advertisements today? Should the U.K. have banned ads that it felt inaccurately portrayed the women (celebrities) in the photographs?
http://multiculturalbeauty.about.com/b/2011/07/30/should-photo-shopped-beauty-ads-be-banned.htm
Marriage as a patriarchal practice
After thinking about the patriarchal traditions in marriage that have been maintained even until today, I remembered some more that we did not have time to address in class.
1. After the the bride and groom are married, the priest or whoever marries them announces, ” I now pronounce you Mr. and Mrs. Joe Smith”. This is the epitome of patriarchy in marriage, I think, because the bride loses her identity at this point. Her name is not even mentioned, she seems to become part of her husband, a unit, or more like a possession if you ask me. Already she is giving up her last name to take on her husband’s so why should her first name be ignored when the couple is announced as married? This practice emphasizes that fact that the woman is being given away and the man is receiving her as his property.
2. Although this is becoming less common, the bride often takes on the man’s last name. While I never thought of this as patriarchal, I see now that it can not only be disrespectful to the bride but also to her family. For example, if a daughter works very hard to make her parents proud and ends up being a successful doctor (though most female doctors keep their maiden names as their practicing names), by carrying her own last name, she is contributing to her family and their success, etc. However, if she uses her husbands last name, his “clan” is basically getting all the credit. Also, tacking on male last names onto female names gives ownership. For example, this same doctor, if she has her father’, last name, is seen as his possession and represents him and his success through her. Overall, by women and girls, married or not, take on the last names of their men, they are being labelled as his possession.
3. I am not sure how many people do this but when the man takes off the wife’s garter at the wedding reception, this objectifies the woman. She sits there as her husband puts his head up her dress and bites off her garter. Not only is this strange for all the other people at her wedding to witness but it highlights the man’s sexual desire. It does not address female desire at all and is something that only pleases the man, therefore this is patriarchal. Lastly, it can also show that the man is expecting sex out of the union. It seems as though the man is thinking “OK. yeah I will go through with this serious wedding ceremony but afterwards we better do something for me…”.
H&M Puts Real Models’ Heads on Fake Bodies
http://jezebel.com/5865114/hm-puts-real-model-heads-on-fake-bodies
I recently found this article, which talks about how H&M takes photos of models’ heads and puts those images on the shoulders of computer-produced images of bodies in order to show off their clothes as best as possible. I obviously find this really problematic. The fact that this is essentially telling women that their clothes look best on a body that doesn’t actually exist tells women that they should be striving to fit an image that doesn’t actually exist. This takes the whole photo-shopping issue that we talked about in class to a new level and this, rather obviously, relates to our readings on the beauty myth, so I just wanted to share it. Here’s a photo of some of the ads H&M is currently running:
Gender101@Bowdoin: Gender Identity and LGBT Characters on TV
In reading this article about the decision to downplay the the sexual relationship between the two female characters in The Color Purple, I was reminded of an essay that I wrote about the depiction of LGBTQ characters in the media, especially on television. Even today, more than twenty-five years since The Color Purple was produced, LGBTQ characters and their sexual relationships are rarely depicted in mainstream media such as film and television. When LGBTQ characters are depicted, often they are shown as platonic (certainly it is unusual to see a homosexual encounter depicted as graphically as heterosexual encounters routinely are). This echoes the decision to depict the relationship between the two female characters in The Color Purple in a relatively non-sexual way.
Even when LGBTQ characters are depicted in mainstream media, this depiction is gendered. In mainstream media, lesbians and gender non-conforming characters remain a minority within the LGBTQ minority itself. GLAAD (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) reports annually on the quantity and quality of LGBTQ depictions on television. I have posted several graphs to Gender101@Bowdoin from their 2010-2011 report that demonstrate the gendered aspect of television depictions (LGBTQ or not)
One thing we didn’t discuss in our presentation on The Color Purple is the lesbian relationship between Celie and Shug. We decided to leave this out due to time-constraints and the fact that the film barely even touches on their relationship. The movie diminishes this relationship to a single…
Thelma and Louise:
One of the central questions for my group when we watched our film, Thelma and Louise, was whether or not it was feminist. The argument could be made that the film is feminist because the producers did not objectify the women in it; these women were, instead, depicted as having their own agency and resisting the attempts of the men in film to objectify them (for example, early on in the film, Thelma decides to leave for the weekend against her husband’s desire). However, even films with female protagonists often subtly objectify them in depicted them as hyper-sexual or sexual objects. Despite granting them apparent agency, producers still objectify these female protagonists by representing them as sexual images for the audience to consume.
In answering whether or not Thelma and Louise are objectified, then, it is important to examine whether or not they are depicted as sexual images. Surprisingly, given the frequency with which women are sexually objectified in film, the producers did not appear to sexualize Thelma or Louise. For instance, there is a sequence in the film during which Louise trades some of her jewelry for a cowboy hat. The producers could easily have shot this sequence in a way that sexualized Louise, but when the angle seems to suggest that this will happen, the camera suddenly shifts upward towards the sky instead of remaining on Louise. In this sense, one could argue that the producers do not reduce Thelma and Louise into sexual objects.
However, while preparing for our presentation, I searched online for a photograph to demonstrate this lack of objectification, and I could only find photographs of the female protagonists which depicted them in sexually provocative poses. Perhaps these photographs are evidence of the advertisers attempt to use the protagonists sexual image to sell the film. Does this mean that Thelma and Louise is not as feminist as it appears? Or is the advertising campaign sufficiently separate from the film to not interfere with its message?
And, if sexual objectification is a method utilized to market products such as films, is it a gender issue or an capitalist issue? The men in Thelma and Louise are certainly sexualized; as one author described, “In one scene, director Ridley Scott inverts the usual Hollywood film and allows Geena Davis’s character to erotically objectify Brad Pitt’s. Between objective shots of her lustful gazing, the film offers the audience her subjective shot of Brad Pitt’s glistening torso” (Harry Benshoff, America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, page 246). Is Thelma and Louise a feminist film because it inverts this gendered process of objectification?
Spielberg’s Decision to “Soften” the Lesbian Sex Between Celie and Shug.
One thing we didn’t discuss in our presentation on The Color Purple is the lesbian relationship between Celie and Shug. We decided to leave this out due to time-constraints and the fact that the film barely even touches on their relationship. The movie diminishes this relationship to a single kiss, whereas their relationship is much more developed (both physically and emotionally) in the original book that the movie is based on. The reason I felt the need to bring this up now is because The Advocate just posted (this afternoon, actually) an article on Steven Spielberg’s decision to diminish Celie and Shug’s relationship due to the fact that they wanted to keep their PG-13 rating. Here is a link to the article (it’s really short): http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2011/12/05/Steven_Spielberg_Says_He_Softened_Lesbian_Sex_in_The_Color_Purple/
Anyway, I just thought it was interesting that Spielberg decided to essentially ignore this relationship so as to keep the movie more appropriate for a certain audience. Now, to his credit, the climate on gay issues in 1985 when this film was released was much different than it is today. However, Spielberg still says that he would still make the same decision today. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? How would this have changed the movie? What does this decision and Spielberg’s statement that he would make the same decision today tell us about the discourses surrounding the topic of LGBTQ people and relationships both then and now?
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