Post №2

The culture I grew up in was based on one principle: everybody in a family listens to the man. He is the one who provides, makes important decisions, the one who is respected, the one who is loved or feared. Woman’s function in the family is to take care of the man and kids, clean, cook, make everybody happy and look pretty. I remember very clearly getting an advice from my grandmother regarding relationships with the man: “Listen to everything he says, agree and smile, but then do it your way. Most likely he won’t even notice”. In my grandma’s generation women were subordinated to men. And looking back there it is great to see that women started to look for alternative ways to achieve what they wanted. However, we still don’t get enough images of women presented as independent individuals with bright personalities and strong characters in our modern culture.

Berger describes an idea of the male gaze as the way women are presented in art like objects created for men to look at. Their only mission is to satisfy spectator’s appetite who is always a male (Berger, 55). He states: “She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another” (Berger, 46). Therefore, women’s appearance always comes first for themselves and for everybody else who look at them.

Laura Mulvey talks about woman as image and man as bearer of the look that represented in cinema (837). Women – passive, men – active. It is unbelievable that this exact pattern appears everywhere we look at – movies, books, magazines, TV commercials, and it is so common and so normal that nobody really cares. However, it is hard to deny that it influences our minds, thoughts, wishes and opinions, shapes our values and morals. Skinny, but with abs, with fit and nicely shaped arms, legs and butt, with perfectly styled long hair and big eyes – this is an ideal woman of media, Victoria’s Secret model. This is the image that so many girls and women are looking at, struggling with diets and being constantly unhappy with their own bodies.  

It is also really upsetting that in a diverse American culture we still see racism in the media. Misrepresentation of black women and men started long time ago with the shows like “Amos ’n’ Andy” (Hooks, 117). Even nowadays we see the wrong images of different races in the movies that create really strong stereotypes. The majority of popular women magazines have white women on a cover. And if we see a black woman, it is such an absurdity, that her skin and hair have to be photoshoped few shades lighter than in reality.   

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We all know in order to make your life easier and more enjoyable you should accept yourself and love yourself the way you are. But it seams almost impossible because we receive hundreds and thousands of media messages daily that are aimed to brainwash without us even realizing it and make us buy products that we don’t even need. So we can feel better about ourselves and get one step closer to beauty and perfection. The minimum that I could do in order to avoid this unlimited source of crap I did long time ago – I stopped buying women magazines.