Western society is deeply habitual in its patriarchal roots, perpetuating unconsciously its own familiarity with the systematic assumptions of man as subject and woman as object. Two women, both highly influential writers and contributors to modern feminist theory, have constructed separately through two of their works, the potential structure of society as it pertains to woman in her relationship to man, defined by man. In part three of her book The Second Sex “Myths: Dreams, Fears, Idols” Simone De Beauvoir lays the foundation for the internal aspects of subject and object assumptions of woman by man and the cause for his outward objectification of woman. Laura Mulvey’s piece “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” furthers the discussion by analyzing the outward expression of these assumptions in the realm of film and cinema, picking apart the method by which male and female characters are typified. These essays create an important dialogue regarding the contribution of both men and women in the assumed function and purpose of men and women in society today and how the unconscious acceptance of traditional symbolic language in culture has affected the patterns in both internal and external realms.
De Beauvoir begins with a description of man as subject and self, the consumer, controller, transcendent and self defined in his totality of authority over woman. He characterizes her as other and object constantly in the full extent of her existence. She is lack, without possession of a phallus, power, or essentiality. The two play roles as active man and passive woman, implying the force of influence brought by man upon his environment and the helplessness of woman as merely consenting or affected. This implies that woman does not ...
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... love, however Mulvey might imply that Arwen is relinquishing her personal power of everlasting life to become a possession of this man. She is the prize at the end of a task, objectified in his desire to obtain her inside the confines of a short human life rather than and endless one alone. This film is worth mentioning due to its lack of blatant sexuality, which is the most obvious method of objectification of women. The identity Arwen defined for herself allowed possession, but had she chosen to keep her eternal life and leave her lover, would she have been a hero to her audience?
Between the two female authors, De Beauvoir analyzes the objectification of woman while Mulvey seeks expose the manifestations of the patriarchal tradition of thinking in culture, to free woman from her deeply engrained role as an object and redefine female identity as an individual.
Today’s culture sees a gap between the male and female gender. This is evident in everything from the films we watch, music we listen to, and even in our everyday lives. Historically, this issue has seen an even larger gap, and can be observed in the films that were made during that time. Vertigo and Citizen Kane both show the objectification of women by controlling them, writing them in supportive roles, and placing their value in the way that they look.
Thus, according to Frankenstein and Candide, we can see how feminism represents the oppression of women in both the culture and time period in which the novels were written. In Frankenstein, the role of the women characters was insignificant, thus having a minimal influence on the plot. After they fulfilled their duties in their domestic sphere, they were discarded. Likewise, in Candide, Voltaire expressed the obstacles women faced and demonstrated the conditions of 18th century Europe and the dangers it was to be a woman at that time. As a result, according to both accounts of women in the two novels, we can see how the time period and culture reflects the inferiority and passivity of the roles of women in both England and Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries.
In “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop, the narrator attempts to understand the relationship between humans and nature and finds herself concluding that they are intertwined due to humans’ underlying need to take away from nature, whether through the act of poetic imagination or through the exploitation and contamination of nature. Bishop’s view of nature changes from one where it is an unknown, mysterious, and fearful presence that is antagonistic, to one that characterizes nature as being resilient when faced against harm and often victimized by people. Mary Oliver’s poem also titled “The Fish” offers a response to Bishop’s idea that people are harming nature, by providing another reason as to why people are harming nature, which is due to how people are unable to view nature as something that exists and goes beyond the purpose of serving human needs and offers a different interpretation of the relationship between man and nature. Oliver believes that nature serves as subsidence for humans, both physically and spiritually. Unlike Bishop who finds peace through understanding her role in nature’s plight and acceptance at the merging between the natural and human worlds, Oliver finds that through the literal act of consuming nature can she obtain a form of empowerment that allows her to become one with nature.
In the movie A Beautiful Mind, the description of schizophrenia is shown in many accurate ways. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) states that the symptoms of this disease are delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, or unorganized or catatonic behavior. People with schizophrenia are also socially withdrawn and awkward when in contact with other people. These traits of the sickness are shown in detail throughout the movie by way of the character John Nash’s struggle with the disease. Nash is a very intelligent professor but believes he is working with the government to foil a Soviet attack plot. Nash eventually goes onto win a Nobel Prize for one of his theories. The movie shows the effects of schizophrenia on not only one man, but also on the friends and family of the ill individual. Treatment is discussed but not to any great length due to him ignoring the doctor’s orders on medication. Overall the movie shows some very prevalent traits of the disease in great detail during certain parts of the film.
Her chief arguing points and evidence relate to the constriction of female sexuality in comparison to male sexuality; women’s economic and political roles; women’s access to power, agency, and land; the cultural roles of women in shaping their society; and, finally, contemporary ideology about women. For her, the change in privacy and public life in the Renaissance escalated the modern division of the sexes, thus firmly making the woman into a beautiful
Gender and the portrayal of gender roles in a film is an intriguing topic. It is interesting to uncover the way women have been idealized in our films, which mirrors the sentiments of the society of that period in time. Consequently, the thesis of this essay is a feminist approach that seeks to compare and contrast the gender roles of two films. The selected films are A few Good Men and Some Like it Hot.
Antisocial personality disorder is a personality disorder marked by a general pattern of disregard for a violation of other people’s rights. Explanations of antisocial personality disorder come from the psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, and biological models. As with many other personality disorders, psychodynamic theorists propose that this disorder starts with an absence of parental love during infancy leading to a lack of basic trust. In this view, the children that develop this disorder respond to early inadequacies by becoming emotionally distant, and they bond with others through use of power and destructiveness. Behavioral theorists have suggested that antisocial symptoms may be learned through modeling, or imitation. As evidence, they point to the higher rate of antisocial personality disorder found among the parents of people with this disorder. Other behaviorists suggest that some parent’s unintentionally teach antisocial behavior by regularly awarding a child’s aggressive behavior. The cognitive view says that people with this disorder hold attitudes that trivialize the importance of other people’s needs. Cognitive theorists also believe that these people have a genuine difficulty recognizing a point of view other than their own. Finally studies show that biological factors may play an important role in developing antisocial disorder. Researchers have found that antisocial people, particularly those with high impulse and aggression, display lower serotonin activity and has been linked this same activity with other studies as well.
Through the society imaginations of genders, the society character can be depicted and captured in this imagery. This virtual representation, the study of an enduring public attitude deceptive in the widespread images of a gender and the ways of representing gender, has proved a productive and enlightening field of research. The stylistic dynamics at work in the genesis and propagating of gender images in the linguistic discourses, and their explicit function, and how they are received is a crucial source in forming a base for the female status in any society. Simone De Beauvoir (2011) addresses the ambiguous imagined femininity by saying “to be considered [as women] she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity”. Such ‘mysterious and threatened reality’ is indeed independent of facts as this paper shall revel, and they neither mirror the female reality nor provide a truthful reflection of the female, but purely part of the cultural imagination.
This essay argues that the film Bridesmaids transcends traditional representations of feminine desire that exhibits women as spectacles of erotic pleasure, through the symbolic reversal of gender identity in cinematic spaces. By discussing feminist perspectives on cinema, along with psychoanalytic theory and ideological narratives of female image, this essay will prove Bridesmaids embodies a new form of feminine desire coded in the space of the comedic film industry.
There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.
The Woman in Love, a section taken from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, describes her theories on men and women in love and the vast differences and purposes they think love is for. This book was published in 1949, and with this in mind we can understand the way she describes women as the weaker sex and how dependent women are on men. In the beginning of the text she states that “The word ‘love’ has not all the same meaning for both sexes, and this is a source of the grave misunderstandings that separate them...love is merely an occupation in the life of the man, while it is life itself for the woman(683).” This first quote from this chapter is important because it really outlines what she is about to get at throughout the entire...
The traditional of universal humanist thought had further defined the difference between men and women as natural fact, grounded in a biological foundation that is prior to social and cultural influence. Simone de Beauvoir had discredited this view with the assertion that ‘One is not born a women,one became a women’.
The work of Simone de Beauvoir’s that says, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” ,distinguishes sex from gender and suggests that gender is an aspect of identity gradually
Feminism is a movement that supports women equality within society. In relation to film, feminism is what pushes the equal representation of females in mainstream films. Laura Mulvey is a feminist theorist that is famous for touching on this particular issue of how men and women are represented in movies. Through her studies, she discovered that many films were portraying men and women very differently from reality. She came up with a theory that best described why there is such as huge misrepresentation of the social status quos of male and female characters. She believed that mainstream film is used to maintain the status quo and prevent the realization of gender equality. This is why films are continuously following the old tradition that males are dominant and females are submissive. This is the ideology that is always present when we watch a movie. This is evident in the films from the past but also currently. It is as if the film industry is still catering to the male viewers of each generation in the same way. Laura Mulvey points out that women are constantly being seen as sexual objects, whether it is the outfits they wear or do not wear or the way they behave, or secondary characters with no symbolic cause. She states that, “in traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote it-be-looked-at-ness.”(Mulvey pg. 715). Thus, women are nevertheless displayed as nothing more than passive objects for the viewing pleasure of the audience. Mulvey also points out through her research that in every mainstream movie, there is ...
The Le Deuxième Sexe by Simone De Beauvoir was written about twenty-one years before Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman and yet it summarizes the gender inequality encountered by the human female species. In De Beauvoir’s book, she takes apart the basis of the gender inequality and the myths and stereotyping attached to being a woman. Atwood’s novel, on the other hand, symbolically identifies the stereotyping that women have to endure their whole lives as the second sex. This writing’s objective is to analyze Atwood’s novel, The Edible Woman using the theories discussed by De Beauvoir.