Sindy Dolls

While I was doing my Media Assignment for this class, I found something very interesting. I was researching about anorexia and how the media impacts, or rather, pushes girls to become anorexic when I came upon the issue of Sindy Dolls. Sindy dolls were very popular during the 1990s and every girl had one in the United States. However, interestingly enough, the dolls were very popular to girls who had not yet gone through puberty. I found that fact very interesting and dug in a little deeper. 

Google showed me images of perfect looking dolls when I searched images of Sindy dolls. The dolls had very slim waists, long and thin legs, and considerably big breasts. These dolls represented images of adult bodies - but especially images of bodies that were not easily approachable by young girls. These dolls therefore created a very big social issue, with the public claiming that the dolls gave young girls false hope that they could indeed reach the image the dolls presented. I totally agree with the claim because the dolls were indeed pretty and it would someway or another lead me to desire for a body like this. Hence, the Sindy dolls really struck me how much the media has impact on our society and how they can change a person's life. The media therefore should be more careful of what they present and make sure that the new trend they make won't have a negative impact on the society as a whole. 

Different thinking

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/brain/she-thinks

      "It’s not what you expect: Women are more resilient, men more focused. She navigates by landmarks, he by internal compass. Our differences are surprising—and profound."After reading this article, I was surprised to find out that men and women are different in the ways they think. Obviously I knew that men and women are different, and that they think differently. However, this article brought me to think of the issue on a completely different level. Men and women think differently, as the article explanations with many supporting claims, including the hemispheres that play different roles and stems from neural circuitry.

      Men and women are different; this statement cannot be refuted. Some women complain and protest, that the ways women are treated are different from the ways men are treated, often treated worse in fact. Until now, I've taken this issue from a very straight and simple perspective. Men, in general, possess more power than women because they have done so ever since the beginning of the mankind. I never sought for explanations to why men had more power than women from the beginning. I just took it as a fact, nothing more and nothing less. However, now, I came to a whole different perspective. There may be explanations for such unfair power divisions between men and women. It would be biased to say that men are more powerful than women in today's society since men's traits and the ways they think are superior to those of women. Instead, I would argue that men and women may have different power divisions and roles in today's society, since many traits are different, far more than just biological features.

Societal Expectations

I know this week we moved on to racial formations, but I had an interesting conversation that completely pertained to this class that I wanted to share. I was at my friend's house for Easter this weekend, and two of her family friends sat next to me during brunch. The first was Craig who is around 50 years old, divorced, and brilliant. The other was Chris who is 27, quirky, slightly emo, and very self-conscious. Somehow we started talking about how men and women are perceived and what exactly their perfect woman consisted of.

Craig believed women had it much harder in society than men. He thought women were constantly having to prove themselves and that as a man he felt no need to try and justify to his peers why, for example, he had earned a promotion. Chris, however, believed that a man he was always in the difficult position. He said that he never felt like he was worthy enough of asking a girl for her number and that women had some sort of upper hand. Chris is about as far from a hegemonic male as you can get, despite being straight, and I wanted to explain that this is why he felt like that. He doesn't conform to how society depicts a male, and because of that he feels insecure when approaching women. Craig is extremely successful and very bright, so he never struggled with his masculinity.

When describing their perfect woman, Craig just wanted someone who was kind and honest. Chris, however, had a checklist of how he wanted his girlfriend to be. He wanted a girl who was "hot" but not "too hot" because he didn't want to feel unworthy. As for her personality, he wants a girl who is slightly aloof. His past girlfriends, he explained, all had some major problem in their lives, like a father who was never around or just a messed up family in general. Everything about Chris explained perfectly why he wanted a shy, damaged girl; these imperfections made him feel superior to her and that is why she was attracted to him.

The conversation felt like a chapter from Masculinities coming to life. These two men had completely opposite personalities and self-awarenesses and their perfect woman and view of society reflected each respectfully.

Kelly Clarkson and Body Image

This past Tuesday I was at the Kelly Clarkson concert at Nokia Theater. What I noticed was that unlike many pop singers, her outfits were conservative, and throughout the performance, she made comments indicating that she was comfortable in her own body. She confessed that she did not like working out, because it hurt too much. These kinds of comments brought smiles to the faces of audience members. Kelly Clarkson is an example of a real role model- in body and actions. Clarkson was more focused on her art, rather than what the cruel critics had to say about her body. 

The media strongly emphasizes and enforces "thin-idealization" in which basically beauty is defined as being as thin as possible. In order to achieve this unrealistic thinness, the movie stars and models under the severe pressure of the spotlight undergo extreme diets, exercises and sometimes, starvation. Magazines especially tear apart stars if they have even the slightest hint of cellulite. We can think back to the Karen Carpenter story. Karen Carpenter is just one example of a star who under the pressures of society's thin-idealization, fell down the path of anorexia. 

Global Gender

While I was in the Institute for Multimedia Literacy building yesterday working on a film shoot, I read a quote one of the students had left on the board that said essentially that gender, like skin color, are particular attributes that no longer seem as defining as before when they were used as barriers for all kinds of segregation, subordination and injustice. Because it was the IML building there were other quotes about technology, the media and the internet. The juxtaposition of these thoughts led me to consider the globalization of gender.

The interconnectivity of globalization coupled with the erosion of identity has crippled the significance of race, gender and nationality by crumbling the barriers perceived between them. The technology that enables us to disturb the correlation between actual self and virtual self has helped to debunk the dogmas and stigmas attached to race, gender and nationality, by neutralizing the divisions. Because it is exponentially easier in myriad ways to supersede, and transcend those seemingly impenetrable boundaries attached to those ideas, we are becoming more connected on a global scale, we are becoming more connected as a global family.

Racism in News Reports: Tulsa, OK Shooting

Facts:

Within a few hours late Friday night/ early Saturday morning, five African-American men were shot in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Three of the men died, and the other two are hospitalized in critical condition. Earlier on Friday, the shooter, Jake England, posted a status update on facebook that referenced his father’s 2010 murder. In his post, he referred to his father’s killer, an African-American man, in the most offensive and derogatory slur possible. Authorities consider the post as evidence of England’s motive and proof that the shootings were hate crimes. 

Before I begin critiquing the issue, I must express my disgust. Above all else, this is a horrible, senseless, and despicable crime.

Critiques:

1.     In all the articles I read about the case, not a single one mentioned anything about the victims beyond their names and ages. Instead, the painful history of the killer, England, was broadcasted and discussed at length. The media seems to be simultaneously damning the shootings and justifying the killer’s motives. Why is the man who held the gun being given more sympathy than the innocent victims? I see this as being one aspect of racialized reporting, an aspect that gives faces and voices to white people and nothing but names and ages to black people.

2.     In England’s facebook post he said: “Today is two years that my dad has been gone shot by a f------ n----- it's hard not to go off”. While all of the articles I read referenced England’s facebook post, all sources censored the word except for one of the major news sources. CNN censored the “f-word” but left the “n-word” in its entirety. I was extremely surprised and disappointed that one of the leading news sources chose to do this. At the top of the article they included a warning: “Editor's note: This story contains language that some readers may consider offensive.” They’re right; it is offensive. You know what else is offensive? The editor says that only “some readers” may consider it as such. Everyone should see that as offensive, ugly language. When a word is censored, it indicates that it is offensive, unacceptable, and prohibited. So why did CNN feel the need to censor out a common and victimless word and keep a word that is saturated with decades of hate, violence, and dehumanization?

3.     One last note: The man who murdered the killer’s father was an African-American man. The cops were unable to prove that he was definitively the person who killed England’s dad; however, he was still imprisoned for a gun related charge. Yet George Zimmerman was never arrested despite having confessed that he killed Trayvon Martin. 

Sources:

 CNN 

DailyMail (yes, this one is probably less credible, but it is also extremely detailed)

Media's Impact on the Image of Women

I recently read an article which was about the study that media representations of women have become more “pornified.” A new study from University at Buffalo researchers tends to confirm that, over the last few decades, the popular-media portrayal of women has become increasingly sexualized. The study used Rolling Stone covers from 1967 to 2009 as fodder with which to measure changes in media representations of men and women. Researcher Erin Hutton, a sociology professor, said they choose Rolling Stone “because it is a well-established, pop-culture outlet” that “offers a useful window into how women and men are portrayed generally in pop culture.” The study authors devised a “scale of sexualization” to measure degrees of sexualization. Points were awarded based on how intensely sexualized a given image was. Comparing Rolling Stone covers by decade, researchers found that in the 1960s, eleven percent of men were sexualized compared to forty-four percent of women. And in the 2000s, seventeen percent of men were sexualized, compared to a whopping eighty-three percent of women. Among all the sexualized images, a mere two percent of men were hypersexualized, contrasted with a revealing sixty-one percent of women.

From the article, I realized that it is clear that as the pop culture develops, popular media outlets such as Rolling Stone are not depicting women as sexy musicians or actors; rather, they are depicting women musicians and actors as ready and available for sex. Reactions of men and women who see those magazines can differ, but even girls think women depicted in those pop media outlets look too cheap. I remember a conversation between me and my friend last time when we were just skimming through some magazines, we talked about how they do not look gorgeous or sexy but just “cheap.” This becomes increasingly problematic because it indicates a decisive narrowing of media representations of women, not just the portrayed musicians or actresses, but women in general.