Free will and the ability to choose for ourselves are some of the most important natures that make us human. As a society though, we have put limits and restraints on some people for arbitrary reasons, and try to override people’s free will, especially young women. In today’s society, young women are subjected to all kinds of prejudice and double standards. From having to face the ‘slut or prude’ paradox of sex, the rules of dressing and appearance, or how to act in public, the amount of scrutiny that they face is outrageous. These issues that they face creates a social dialogue that is constantly analyzing young women and how they act, enough that it slowly worked to become social knowledge that almost every women follows consciously and subconsciously, and then they force on others. This is social knowledge that states that women’s main goal is to please men, and that their worth is established by how they look. They must wear the right amount of make-up, dress skimpy but also conservatively, and basically become little toy dolls that are created into what a guy wants them too.
This discourse of the womanly image also causes boys to believe that women are around for their amusement and usage, and can further produce and enforce the hyper sexuality and control of women’s identities. Furthermore, Modern media influences every aspect of American life, and has been a complete catalyst of this knowledge, with the image of hyper sexuality being shown anywhere and everywhere you look. Women are shown as sex objects in magazines, music, television shows, and most movies have borderline pornographic scenes in them. This could reinforce the social knowledge already constructed, but at a faster rate and to anywhere in the world. It can al...
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...oever they want in the world, and they will be whoever they want, no matter what it is.
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Girls try to copy the clothes the celebrities wear because it is what’s considered cool. They wear makeup because if they don’t have the perfect complexion, the sexy eyes or the right lip color they are considered ugly. Society has taken away our say in what is beautiful and attractive. Society controls what to wear and how to look. The short story, “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” by James Tiptree shows how society can dominate the lives of the individual. This story shows why following societies demands can be quite fatal.
An analysis of the relationship between pornography and the American culture reveals that the industry is blamed for dozens of social ills for the men of our society. Those ills also work to damage the women in several irreparable ways. Some of the damages to men include: illegal sexual behavior, illegal non-sexual behavior, callousness, sexual harassment, casual sex, and multiple sexual partners. The problems for the women directly involved in the industry are long term and long lasting, creating overall issues that affect women’s economic and social status. But what are there damages caused by the type of movies most women love, the type of movies they drag their boyfriends and husbands to, the type of movies millions watch unashamedly in public-the romantic comedy?
Deborah Tolman author of “Dilemmas of Desire” dwells on uncovering a wealth of feelings about sexuality from teenage girls who are faced with a lot of struggles in developing sexual identity and detached from their sexuality. One of her main argument is centered on the juxtaposition of media representations of girls as highly sexualized objects. For instance, “the urban girl is viewed as the overly sexual young jezebel. Latinas are often eroticized as exotic, sexually alluring and available.” (Tolman, pg.170). I agree with this statement due to simple fact that we are living in a highly sexualized cultural milieu and evidence of sexualization is seen through mainstream culture. Images such as Sarah Bartman depict African American/ urban portrayal of sexual imagery formed socio-historical
Countering the Culture of Sex is an article by Ellen Goodman dealing with the entertainment industry’s plague upon society. With sex rooted deep in children’s minds it creates this idea of what life revolves around. Digging deeper, Goodman brings up the point of why one never sees the consequences of sex. If the media were to show the consequences of people’s actions, the industry could create a sense of fear into the public.
Research shows how gender roles in America have evolved and have changed over the last centuries, although there could be many reasons for this change I will examine the most likely causes for the change. According to Human Sexuality in a World of Diversity gender role is a “learned role by observing behaviors of their parents, peers and media” (pg 25). The following are the topics studied: Increased technology and accessibility to internet, violence and explicit content in video games, movies and television shows.
Sexualization of women is taught to the public from an early age through the media. This is not a new phenomena, however. As Roberts and Zurbriggen (2012) address, the problem exponentially compounds over time, as evolving mass communication technology creates more opportunities for the press to teach sexualization. New technology is not entirely negative though, as it allows the public to more easily engage in discussions regarding the expression of
One of the factors that heavily influence the continuing propagation of these ideas associated with the sexuality of racialized women is the production and dissemination of media images, symbols and narratives (Brooks & Hébert, 2006, p. 297). As a society who is constantly consuming media culture through various media outlets, television uses a combination of methods in imagery, symbolization, and narration to represent our social realities. Notions of what beauty means are further dictated by fashion and reality television shows, which includes shows that discuss trends, makeovers, modeling, and more. In turn, these television programs often targeted at young women themselves, continue to shape how society views women of color, particularly how women of color are superfi...
Mary Pipher goes on to say that the problem faced by girls is a ‘problem without a name’ and that the girls of today deserve a different kind of society in which all their gifts can be developed and appreciated. (Pipher,M). It’s clear that cultures and individual personalities intersect through the period of adolescence. Adolescence is a time in a young girl’s life that shapes them into the woman they become. I think it begins earlier than teen years because even the clothing that is being sold for younger girls says sexuality. Bras for girls just beginning in every store are now padded with matching bikini underwear, Barbie dolls are glamour up in such away that these girls believ...
Instead, women are being discriminated and treated as inferior due to the stereotypes that are portrayed in the media. The media creates and reproduces ways of seeing that at a minimum reflect and shape our culture. We can look at the media to understand more about a culture’s values and norms, if we realize the limitations of looking at the media. For example, one may ask, does the news based in the United Sates represent what the American culture is like, or only what stands out from everyday American culture? The answer to that is no. Instead, the media represents what it thinks it will be able to sell and is supported by advertisements. This includes violent acts, the sensationally and inappropriate. Jhally reminds us that “it is this male, heterosexual, pornographic imagination based on the degradation and control of women that has colonized commercial culture in general, although it is more clearly articulated in music videos” (Jhally 2007). Therefore, “media content is a symbolic rather than a literal representation of society and that to be represented in the media is in itself a form of power—social groups that are powerless can be relatively easily ignored, allowing the media to focus on the social groups that ‘really matter’” (Gerbner,
In “Little Girls or Little Women? The Disney Princess Effect,” Stephanie Hanes covers the sexualization of young girls and women in every aspect of the media that influences children and teens. She explains that girls see media figures, movies, and sports being sexualized, and how this is causing children to associate looking and acting a certain way to being ‘the perfect women’. Hanes believes the hypersexualized media is causing girls to obtain a negative body image and it’s killing their self-esteem. The author proposes what she believes society should do about overcoming this obstacle, and how people can crush the stereotypes about women; to her everyone is responsible and should aid in fixing these problems. She explains that the media
However, some people still carry the misogynist mindset that women who act like a “slut” simply lack positive guidance and that this new mainstream shaming might help prevent naive girls from making bad decisions. George Tyndale from The Sunday Mercury defends his position by saying, “Peer pressure is the only thing that many young girls respond to, and if fellow teenagers are the only thing that makes them think twice about their appearance and behavior, then so be it” (Tyndale). Many others agree with him, as well as blame other girls for their “cattiness” and are disgusted by the disturbing over-sexualization in today’s media. They justify their crude remarks by believing that they are helping them; that their slander is actually sensible advice that should be taken (Tyndale). Instead, they are contributing to a society that dehumanizes women and makes it seem like we ...
To begin, social media has created unrealistic standards for young people, especially females. Being bombarded by pictures of females wearing bikinis or minimal clothing that exemplifies their “perfect” bodies, squatting an unimaginable amount of weight at a gym while being gawked at by the opposite sex or of supermodels posing with some of life’s most desirable things has created a standard that many young people feel they need to live up to. If this standard isn’t reached, then it is assumed that they themselves are not living up to the norms or the “standards” and then therefore, they are not beautiful. The article Culture, Beauty and Therapeutic Alliance discusses the way in which females are bombarded with media messages star...
On a daily basis people are exposed to some sort of misrepresentation of gender; in the things individuals watch, and often the things that are purchased. Women are often the main target of this misrepresentation. “Women still experience actual prejudice and discrimination in terms of unequal treatment, unequal pay, and unequal value in real life, then so too do these themes continue to occur in media portraits.”(Byerly, Carolyn, Ross 35) The media has become so perverted, in especially the way it represents women, that a females can be handled and controlled by men, the individual man may not personally feel this way, but that is how men are characterized in American media. Some may say it doesn’t matter because media isn’t real life, but people are influenced by everything around them, surroundings that are part of daily routine start to change an individual’s perspective.
"Children are influenced by media–they learn by observing, imitating, and making behaviors their own" (APA, 2001, p.1224). Girl’s as young as 4-years sees Britney Spears music clip “Baby One More Time”, who at the time was a 17-year old girl/world pop icon at the time wearing a school uniform showing off her midriff, wearing a lot of makeup and a short skirt. Disney teen icons such as Miley Cyrus aka Hannah Montana taking personal photos of herself in “sexy” poses and sending it to her ‘older’ boyfriend and then having it all published all over the internet for the entire world to see. Boys also face sexualization too, as has been seen in Calvin Klein ads, where pubescent-looking boys pose provocatively with perfectly sculpted six-pack abs hawking teen fashion These pop culture celebrities both female and male are always in the media, for inappropriate actions and they’re meant to be role models for children. In fact most of these sexualized celebrities are still children themselves. The sad part is it’s not just sexualization being encouraged in the media other negative things such as violence, drug and alcohol use ...
An article by Christina N Baker, Images of Women’s Sexuality in Advertisements: A Content Analysis of Black And White Oriented Women’s and Men’s Magazine, emphasizes on how women’s are portrayed in media such as advertisements and Magazine. The author analyzes how media has a huge impact in our society today; as a result, it has an influence on race and gender roles between men and women. According to Baker, an ideal woman is an object that exists to satisfy men’s sexual desires; therefore, sexuality is the cause of gender inequality between men and women in our society. This ideal woman is a White woman who is portrayed to be in a submissive or family role since African American women are underrepresented in the media. White women are portrayed as sex objects and icon of beauty, meanwhile Black women have been portrayed as aggressive, independent and not submissive.