Blog post 5

Savanna Wingard

Money and Ucker

WMS 2000-92

20 March 2015

View the recording of the lecture "Pornland" in the library course reserves and answer the following:

(Note: you must download Quicktime or use a campus computer to watch the video.)

1. What is Dines' view of porn?

2. Go back to chapters 5 and 6 and relate Dines' discussion to any of the readings.

3. How does this discussion play into feminism? How can Dines be against porn but still be viewed as a feminist?

Watching the documentary Pornland, I was very appalled by what I saw. I have never seen porn. I assumed that it was just people having sex like on Game of Thrones (which according to the video is soft-core porn, so I guess technically I have seen porn) and women dressed in revealing plumber costumes. I had no idea what porn was really like; so obviously, it came as a huge shock to me that the porn industry is what it is.

Dine’s view of pornography is that it is a grotesque interpretation of sex and that it has hijacked women’s sexuality. It has done so by making porn increasingly violent and by basically making women in porn purely an orifice for men to put their genitals into instead of an actual human being. I think this is pretty true from what I saw in that video; however, I was talking about this video with a male friend of mine and he watched it and told me that not all porn was like the pornography in the video, so it may not be completely true. I have no interest in exploring porn further than that video to form my own opinion on the porn industry though.

I think the video and this discussion play into feminism because certain things in the porn industry objectify women. Things that were shown that were extremely violent, and calling the female pornstar things like “slut,” “whore,” and “bitch” while having violent sex with her is demeaning and objectifies her so that people watching do not really think of her as a person. In Vampires and Vixens by Alison Happel and Jennifer Esposito, they discuss sexualized violence as empowerment as analyzed in the movie Twilight. During the movie, whenever something violent occurs, Bella (played by Kristen Stewart) is seen trying to look sexy (and failing. I always thought she was having menstrual cramps or something). When she is mouth breathing, I always thought she just couldn’t breathe… Dines can be against porn and still call herself a feminist because she looks at the porn industry and how it objectified women to support her arguments about why the porn industry is not good for women and hijacks their sexuality. The thing is, on one hand you have the porn industry objectifying women and hijacking their sexuality, but on the other, women have the choice to go into the porn industry. Yes, some of them may be there because they are used to it and were abused or assaulted, but many of them are not there because of that. They are there to make money. I knew a girl in high school who wanted to be a pornstar. She dropped out of high school when she turned 18 to be a stripper. I do not know what she is doing now, but that was my point. To make porn for a living is a choice. They have auditions like any other actors would have, and are cast into a movie based upon their skills and the skills required for the film. Not only that, but I have seen internet memes where pornstar Sasha Grey jokes about porn and being a pornstar. She seems to enjoy what she does, and that is her choice.

Esposito, Jennifer and Alison Happel. Vampires and Vixens. 2010. Print.

Pornland: How the Porn Industry Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. Media Education Foundation. Web. 20 March 2015.

Blog Post 4

Savanna Wingard

Money and Ucker

WMS 2000-92

13 March 2015

            Beyoncé is one of many celebrities who have joined the feminist movement. She mainly expresses her feminist ideas and beliefs through her music, but sometimes she expresses it in her performances or in interviews. Examples of her feminist music include songs such as “Flawless,” “Run the World (Girls),” “Listen,” “Me, myself, and I,” and “Diva.” “Flawless” is definitely the most feminist of her songs. In the middle of the song, Beyoncé quotes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from her 2013 TEDx Talk titled, “We Should All Be Feminists.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “We teach girls to shrink themselves; to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise you will threaten the man.’ Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy, and love, and mutual support, but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don't teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors; not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing. But for the attention of men, we teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. Feminist: the person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.” To me, this quote is very powerful. It opened my eyes a little more and made me think, “Oh wow. She’s right.” I also think that the definition of feminism is a great thing to have put in there. It reminds people what a feminist actually is. Sure, there are radicals, or people who are very hardcore feminists, but with this definition, I think it makes people realize that, in a way, many people are feminists, and without this definition, they would have never thought so. While Beyoncé is not a radical or hardcore feminist (or so it seems), she does make anywhere from subtle to bold, hard to miss statements in some of her performances. In the 2013 Super Bowl halftime show, Beyoncé performed with an all-female band and all-female dancers. She even performed with the other two members of Destiny’s Child, the group with which she got her start in the music industry. I actually did not notice the all-female casting until it was pointed out to me in, “Beyoncé: Feminist Icon?” by Sophie Weiner. After reading about it, I logged onto YouTube, where I rewatched the halftime show. Weiner was right: I did not spot one male in the show. An example of when she can be up in your face about it is during her performance in the 2014 Video Music Awards (VMAs), when “FEMINIST” popped up on the display behind her. It took her a while to actually call herself a feminist, but when she did, as she told The Daily Mail, it was not something that she “consciously decided to be.” I think we all are at least slightly feminists. “Feminist: the person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.”

Duca, Lauren. “Beyonce Gave You The Definition Of Feminism, Now Use It.” The Huffington Post. 25 August 2014. Web. 13 March 2015.

Hare, Breeanna. “Beyonce opens up on feminism, fame and marriage.” CNN. 12 December 2014. Web. 13 March 2015.

Weiner, Sophie. “Beyonce: Feminist Icon?” 2013. Print.

Here is Beyonce's amazing Super Bowl performance.

Also, I found this, and wanted to share it since it went along with the theme of this post.

Midterm

Savanna Wingard

Money and Ucker

WMS 2000-92

3 March 2015

Thinking about chapter 5, answer the following questions:

1. What are your favorite forms of popular culture and why? Discuss the ways your favorite forms maintain and/or resist systems of inequality and privilege.

2. How does social media reflect, maintain and/or resist systems of inequality?

My favorite forms of popular culture are television and movies, and music. I love television and movies because I’m a movie junkie. It’s what I normally do in my free time. I love music because it is a form of self-expression. Although, I hate most modern popular music because it’s either lifeless or the ideals are just really trashy, in my opinion. The media plays such a large role in society, and it continuously sexualizes women. We need to move past the point of women being sex objects.

So many people who watch TV and movies, whether it’s online, in the theatres, or actually on the television. There are also movies set in different times, or the content of the show or movie just appeals to people in a way that I can’t explain. For example, the show, “Mad Men” was very popular on AMC. It was set in the 1960s in New York City, and starred rich white men having affairs with secretaries, while being at the top of their business. I only saw one episode, so I don’t have an opinion of it, but I’ve heard enough about it to draw these conclusions. There are shows like Mad Men, where women have little to no power; and there are shows like MTV’s Girls Gone Wild, where girls are glorified as sex objects who can control men with their looks. Girls Gone Wild is an example of what Susan Douglas calls, “enlightened sexism.” “Enlighted sexism is a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism-indeed, full of equality has allegedly been achieved-so now it’s okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women” (Douglas 285). Disney princess movies mainly consist of the female leads looking for love; and the characters are so young. Ariel in The Little Mermaid was 16, and Pocahontas was only 11 when she is said to have met John Smith (though they did not have a love connection in real life). As was pointed out in the documentary, Miss Representation, female Disney characters are usually sexualized. Ariel is in a seashell bra/bikini top, and when she “becomes human,” she is naked. While that makes sense since she no longer has a fish tail and obviously won’t just magically have shorts on, it would make sense if she still had the sea shells on. Where did those go? There are few movies where there is a female lead that is not sexualized. Movies such as Silence of the Lambs, both Kill Bill movies, and The Shining are all movies that have a female protagonist who is not sexualized. I recently showed Kill Bill to my younger, 16 year old brother. Throughout the course of the movie, he kept saying, “She’s so ugly.” and I just responded with, “Josh, shut up and watch the movie. Focus on the movie.” By the end, when I asked him what he thought, he said, “It was a good movie, but that lady is still really ugly, even if she is a total badass.” Even after the cliffhanger of an ending, the action, and Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant direction and effects seen within the movie, he was still unable to look past the fact that Uma Thurman was not made up to be a hot, sexy woman showing a lot of skin. It’s not just a standard in television though.

While there are songs about equality, activism, and peace, but there are so many more songs that include racial stereotyping and sexism. These are the more popular songs that I hear most kids listening to nowadays. The majority of songs now are about sex or “the booty” and are accompanied by sexualized music videos or a girl in a sexy outfit. Even album covers have pictures of minimally-covered women.

During last year’s super bowl, I remember watching a commercial that had a sexy woman on a beach or with a car, and I thought, “Great, another car commercial.” and it was a commercial for a burger… I looked at my mother, and we were both speechless. It was also the super bowl that featured Beyoncé in the halftime show. She performed with an all-female band, and there was even a reunion with Destiny’s Child, the group that she started her musical career with. Beyoncé made a statement for feminism while rocking the superdome at the same time. While her performance outfits can be quite revealing, she speaks some of her feminist ideals through some of her songs or in her music videos. In Beyoncé: Feminist Icon, Sophie Weiner points out that Beyoncé and Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” music video contain allusions to Thelma and Louise and a gender inverted Pulp Fiction. There are quite a few other allusions, especially to Tarantino films, but Weiner was right when she said that these references were a great way to show that girl power can reign supreme.

Women are sexualized all over the media. Once we can move past the media portraying women as just sex objects, we can accomplish so much more than we have and expand our influence in our society.

Douglas, Susan. Enlightened Sexism. 2010. Print.

Miss Representation. Girls Club Entertainment. Roco Films Educational. 2011. Web. 3 March 2015.

Weiner, Sophie. Beyoncé: Feminist Icon? 2013. Print.