"In another study, three weeks of Saturday morning toy commercials were analyzed. Results found that:
50% of the commercials aimed at girls spoke about physical attractiveness, while none of the commercials aimed at boys referenced appearance.
Boys acted aggressively in 50% of the commercials aimed at them, while none of the girls behaved aggressively.
With regard to work roles, no boys had unpaid labor roles, and girls were mainly shown in traditional female jobs or roles of unpaid labor (Sobieraj, 1996). "

I found these statistics at: http://www.mediafamily.org/facts/facts_mediaeffect.shtml.

I just posted these statistics, though the article had many interesting facts, so I would suggest looking at it, because it related to the research project I was doing. It was interesting to me because it soley deals with saturday morning cartoons, so the advertisements are targeted towards younger children. It is crazy how early these gender stereotypes and roles start! Who are making these? Are they thinking about their sons/daughters while they are? I guess it benefits them in some way, but still, I think it is crazy. I also do not know how they are showing little girls in domestic roles. Oh wait, I as I was writing that I remembered the presentation with the girl commercial where she was singing about how she loved to bake and do laundry. I think that I will definately be more aware of these things from now on (and I already am...my friends are always dealing with me pointing out these things to them...i.e. at our physics officer elections the only people nominated for secretary were females...and I pointed it out to a few ppl.).

Double Standards

So I was eating dinner today when the subject of mariah carey's new song 'touch my body' came up. I had never heard it, but my friends were saying that it was fairly disturbing. I went and looked up the lyrics they were talking about and was struck by the chorus:

"Cause if you run your mouth and brag
About this secret rendezvous
I will hunt you down"

It's mainly that, I will hunt you down part that struck me. The premise of the song is mariah singing to an unmentioned man about how he needs to touch her body (hence the name of the song) and how. It is very demanding, and, as shown above, she threatens that if he talks about their encounter, she will hunt him down. This part of the song is audibly very clear. It just made me think about what the reaction to this song would be if it were a man singing it. I think it would be a really negative reaction and it would be related to rape. I mean, if some man was demanding to be touched and threatening the girl to not talk about it, people would be really mad. This is a double standard. I think people are not upset or offended about it because people don't often think of rape in the context of the female doing the forcing. Is this because of the antiquated view of women being weak and subservient? I would definitely argue that that view is outdated (just look at the lyrics to this, or practically any other, popular female song). This just circles back in my mind to this 'invisible war against boys.' It would be so hard for a male to come out and say that he has been raped because it would threaten his masculinity, and who knows how his friends would treat him.

A lot of this class, and my blogs, are about this war against boys. I think that this is because I went into this class expecting to focus on girls/femininity. I guess when I thought of gender, I thought of women. That circles back to the whole idea that when you are in the majority, you are not associated with the title (i.e. when you think of race, you think black/African American, sexual orientation you think homosexual, etc). I had never really considered the male gender and any sort of pressure they felt.

PS--I have nothing against this song--just sparked some thoughts for me

Our Racist, Sexist Selves

This article talks about how ingrained some racist/sexist attitudes are in us. He claims that we can be more sexist than racist (categorize somebody's gender before race and athletes-remembering jersey/team association and gender more so than race). He talks a lot about how if we meet somebody who does not fit a stereotype to their demographic, we just file them as 'the exception.' If we meet and are exposed to a lot of a minority in "higher" positions (professors, doctors, etc) we think of them as an anomaly. People exposed to a higher number of female professors tend to have less gender stereotypes. I would imagine the same would go for being exposed to more African Americans. I think if you don't know many you are more apt to listen to stereotypes and buy into media representations. If you are friends with or know many, you will see that not everybody fits the stereotypes; you are more likely to see people as individual people. This relates to our discussion on oppression; you know that you are not the one being oppressed if you do not have to always speak for your entire minority.

honor killings/fgm

I feel so lucky to have a supportive family. This was my overriding thought during Sammar's presentation. I was horrified to actually read the accounts of the honor killings. They were so brutal, and many of them involved young children, either as victims or spectators. I cannot imagine living in fear of my own father or brother hurting or killing me because I had a boyfriend they did not approve of or they thought I was flirting with somebody inappropriately. I also cannot imagine how a parent can kill their own child so brutally. It must be so ingrained in them at young ages; it is brainwashing. In the families that do this it is clear that the women are treated like second class family members. Males can have affairs or pre-marital sex, but women are killed if they are, or even if they are suspected to have had sex outside of marriage. They would even kill females if they were raped--that is crazy; nobody goes out with the intent of getting raped, and it is not the victims fault. Women in those lives must feel so contrained by a lack of choice; they cannot choose their husband or speak their mind. They also have to teach their daughters to be this way too for fear they will be pariahs and not supported if not.

The same thing goes for fgm. I was so upset when we were hearing what that actually is in class. I had heard about them before, but never in that much detail or hearing about the consequences. I don't know how anybody would find that to be a good idea. The most upseting part is that it is females doing this to other females. I was shocked when that lady that said it had to be done to dissipate any sexual desire, because she was a woman in support of woman mutilation. It upsets me so much. I also don't really see why the males in these societies would like this. I'm not an expert on the subject, but I feel like if I were a male and I wanted to have sex with a woman, it would not be as pleasurable if she had undergone genital mutilation. Also, if sex is so painful for the woman with fgm, I would imagine it would be hard to find a woman who was willing to have sex with you. Fgm also has negative effects in reproduction and fertility, so that makes it harder to procreate and give birth; one of the main points of sex. It just baffles me. It just seems like an embarrassment of sorts to the female.

Oppression and the Bird Cage

In this article by Marilyn Frye, she relates female oppression to a bird cage. One of her main points is the macroscopic picture. If you look really close at female oppression or at the bird cage, you might only see one bar in the woman's/bird's way, but if you step back and take in the whole picture, there is a whole cage.

She talks a lot about the double standards that woman have to live with. One of them, the most common one in my mind, is that she has to be sexually active, but not too much. I think that one is pretty easy to understand. One that really surprised me was the one about rape: "If a woman is raped, then if she has been heterosexually active she is subject to the presumption that she liked it (since her activity is presumed to show that she likes sex), and if she has not been heterosexually active, she is subject to the presumption that she liked it (since she is supposedly "repressed and frustrated")." I had never heard of any justification to rape of a woman who was not sexually active like this before. I have heard excuses for raping a sexually active woman similar to the one given in addition to blaming the girls outfit or flirting. I was just surpised to see that there was any sort of justification to raping someone who was not sexually active; if you were a virgin, who the hell would want their first time to be a rape?

One other thing that she talks about is the chivalry of men. The specific example she uses is a male holding a door open for a female no matter the amount of things he is holding vs. the amount she is. These same men, though, do not help with daily chores and dinner etc. The opening of the door is symbolic for men thinking that women are incapable: "The message of the false helpfulness of male gallantry is female dependence, the invisibility or insignificance of women, and contempt for women." To me, it is just holding the door. I do not expect it from any man, and after coming to Juniata, I see that people (males and females) hold doors open all of the time for others regardless of their sex. But I do agree that woman are often treated as incapable, and the man needs to save the day. I think some of this steams from a lot of chick flicks. If you look at them, most of the story lines involve the woman needing some sort of saving from the man. This perpetuates the myth, and I think some males see these and want to be that man for a woman they know. The prevalence of superhero movies also does not help.

Goldstein and War

For the analysis of are men more violent than women, I used Goldstein's chaper five about men and war. It was scary to read how so much of the upbringing of boys is to prepare them for war. It reminded me of that 'tough guise' movie we watched and how this upbringing can be so detrimental to males. Males are told to suppress their emotions and distance themselves from feeling. This is to help them in a war situation where they have to be killing the enemy men; distancing themselves from them makes it easier to justify it to themselves. Males are taught to idolize Rambo and other military figures. The video games and shows targeted towards boys are violent (the Transformers show averages an attempted murder ever 30seconds). Boys are put in a 'gender straightjacket' Boys are teased if they do not fit the stereotype and they feel shame if they show feeling. It is sick that all of this suppression of emotion is for war. This shut down of emotion also, according to Goldstein, contributes to violence against women.

This article just proved even more to me that boys have just as small as a box as girls do. I did not really realize that previously. It connects to everything we've been talking about in class with the whole tough exterior and unsure on the inside.

Sex, Women, and the Media

Inspired by today's presentation, I found this very interesting article:
http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/women_sex.cfm

"The pressure put on women through ads, television, film and new media to be sexually attractive—and sexually active—is profound. " The article explores how sex is so apparent in the media. She argues that all of this sex in the media makes sex more trivial and uniform. "We are offered a pseudo-sexuality that makes it far more difficult to discover our own unique and authentic sexuality." The article talks about how women are objectified in advertisements and children's media outlits. Women in video games/cartoons: 38% wearing sparse clothes, 23% showing cleavage, 31% showing thighs, 31% exposing midriffs, and 15% showing their butts. Women in t.v. shows are less often shown at work, and most often their story lines revolve around relationships and talking about men. The article also talks about how some advertisements show women saying no, but clearly meaning yes.

I thought this related a lot to what we've been discussing in class.