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.