Check Out This Website

I just noticed that someone has written about a post on this website before, but tonight was my first time encountering this website. I also saw that someone posted it on Facebook. Here is the link to the post which claims there are "24 signs a girl is a slut" http://www.returnofkings.com/16837/24-signs-shes-a-slut . The site itself claims that it is a site for "masculine men" and judging by the posts in the site masculine men are men who call girls sluts and are not by any means considered "weak."One of the signs talked about in this post is that she goes to a known party school (one of the mentioned schools being USC). I know that this post has been seen by a lot of people and is making its rounds on Facebook, not to mention the site is gaining a lot of fans on Twitter and other social media sites. This means more eyes are on posts like this, meaning it could lead to more men seeing women in this way. The post claims all 24 signs are "some of the most accurate predictors" to letting someone know if a girl is in fact anything but innocent. Some of the signs are based on simple appearance, like tattoos and piercings. Overall this is scary to think that many people, especially men, are reading posts like these. Assumptions like these can possibly instigate rape culture or just heavily skew men's perception of women. Should women now be afraid to have tattoos or call themselves a feminist?

Am I the only person who thinks Miley Cyrus is appropriating queer culture?

Several hours after the release of Miley Cyrus' "We Can't Stop" music video, I was sitting on the couch to watch it at the insistence of several of my queer friends, who excitedly told me, "LOOK! Miley Cyrus is GAY!" I didn't consider myself a fan of hers but I asked them, "isn't she engaged to that guy?" and they told me "JUST WATCH THIS!" so I sat to watch it as soon as I could. Before I was even halfway through the video, I could see why my friends thought so. The implications start in the lyrics, which inform me that this is Miley's party so she can kiss who she wants and love who she wants. While the lyrics play, we see Miley wrestle with girls suggestively, slap their asses, and make out with an oversized Barbie doll. She gets a piggy back ride from a girl in a pool and grabs her chest in return. Her short haircut is styled provocatively as she sticks out her tongue between two fingers. Nonsensically, Miley even watches excitedly as smoke flies out of a masculinely-dressed girl's crotch. As if this wasn't enough of a hint, Autostraddle posted an article, "The 24 Gayest Things in the New Miley Cyrus Video" for the oblivious. 

Still, she was engaged and I didn't think anything of it again until the release of the video for Wrecking Ball. I stood by dumbfounded as my straight friends and the media proclaimed the song to be about her heartbreak over breaking up with her male fiance. On screen, Miley wears a wifebeater and Doc Martins as she "can't live a lie" and is "running for her life," even though she will "always want" the subject of her lyrics. This video is nearly in black and white, with only three features splashing against the drab monotone of the set: bright red lips, an equality tattoo, and Miley's tears. Don't get me wrong, it is entirely possible, and even likely, that Miley Cyrus is NOT gay. Take Chely Wright for example: as beautiful and popular in country music as Miley is with the Top 40 crowd, she hid her orientation for years out of fear and her videos reflect this insecurity. Cyrus, on the other hand, appears to flaunt queer imagery as often as possible.

However, assuming that Miley is straight, her ability to bombard audiences with such imagery is a certain co-opting of queer culture. Fairly, her appropriation of black culture has faced intense scrutiny over the past several months because it is a thoughtless exotification of "otherness" being employed to draw attention to Miley's image. Shouldn't the same scrutiny be applied to the queer implications she hints at as well?

Reading(/Viewing) for Monday

Hey all: Here's an article for your consideration - please come ready to discuss.
http://www.autostraddle.com/how-do-we-solve-a-problem-like-queerbaiting-on-tvs-not-so-subtle-gay-subtext-182718/

If you're not familiar with the show, you're strongly encouraged to check out this quick video called "5 Reasons Why Rizzoli & Isles is the Gayest Show on TV":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuzc6l_kjEI


Also:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:paxnuAApJucJ:www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57611189/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Film Remakes: Reading for Monday and Questions

Remaking History: A Study of the Representation of Women in Film Remakes
by Stanzi Wicht, Anya McGanty, Erica Demitroff, Chelsea Khakshouri

Here are some passages from Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex:

"Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Michelet writes: ‘Woman, the relative being ...’ And Benda is most positive in his Rapport d’Uriel: ‘The body of man makes sense in itself quite apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself ... Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.’

The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality – that of the Self and the Other...

Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If three travellers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the rest of the passengers on the train. In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country all who inhabit other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists, aborigines are ‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged.

... But the other consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim. The native travelling abroad is shocked to find himself in turn regarded as a ‘stranger’ by the natives of neighbouring countries. As a matter of fact, wars, festivals, trading, treaties, and contests among tribes, nations, and classes tend to deprive the concept Other of its absolute sense and to make manifest its relativity; willy-nilly, individuals and groups are forced to realize the reciprocity of their relations. How is it, then, that this reciprocity has not been recognised between the sexes, that one of the contrasting terms is set up as the sole essential, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative and defining the latter as pure otherness? Why is it that women do not dispute male sovereignty? No subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the inessential; it is not the Other who, in defining himself as the Other, establishes the One. The Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One. But if the Other is not to regain the status of being the One, he must be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view. Whence comes this submission in the case of woman?

... The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organising themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women. The proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males. The bond that unites her to her oppressors is not comparable to any other. The division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history. Male and female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein, and woman has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together, and the cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another."


Questions to consider:
1) What is the 'ideal' woman? Is she attainable?
2) Why did women for so many years submit to a master-slave relationship with men?
3) Have women fully broken free from their slave-like roles? Are they still 'The Other'?

Mad Women on TV- "A Mirage of Power"

Greetings Class,

To prepare you for our presentation on Mad Women on TV please read and come ready to discuss on the following articles.

What are the implications of the mad woman protagonist on TV?
Are successful, happy, healthy women uninteresting?

Best,

3 Mad Women & a Mad Man
Chanel, Helene,Hannah & Michael

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/magazine/tvs-new-wave-of-women-smart-strong-borderline-insane.html?_r=0

Disney Princess Presentation: Article and Questions for 12/2

Hello all,

Here is the article we ask that you read before our presentation on 12/2.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/magazine/24princess.t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

We also ask that you consider the following before our presentation:

1. Have Disney Princesses had an effect on your childhood or do they in anyway shape a part of your childhood?

2. Pick your favorite Disney Princess, does she possess any progressive attributes in terms of female representation? Regressive? Can you note any similarities throughout other Disney Princess films or is your Princess decidedly different?

3. Please come prepared to discuss your Princess, maybe re-watch the film (there are a bunch on netflix!). We will be sitting in groups of Princesses during class.

4. Frozen will be discussed briefly in our presentation, so if you have the chance to go see it, we highly encourage it!

Have fun with this!
Victoria, Adriana, Pam

Article

I'm sure a lot of you have seen this, as it's been popping up on Facebook for the last week or so. For those who haven't, this is a horrific article about the positive reasons to date girls who suffer from eating disorders. The article concludes with the sentence, "Say what you will, a girl with a mild-to-moderate eating disorder- that hasn't excessively marred her appearance- is today's best-busy in the West's rapidly plummeting dating market." There are a million things to be said about that sentence alone, let alone the article in its entirety and the incredibly backwards state our society is clearly in.

Here is the article:
http://www.returnofkings.com/21313/5-reasons-to-date-a-girl-with-an-eating-disorder

And here is the petition to get it removed from the internet:
http://www.change.org/petitions/www-returnofkings-com-remove-the-article-5-reasons-to-date-a-girl-with-an-eating-disorder?share_id=kykkqxGjxS&utm_campaign=signature_receipt&utm_medium=email&utm_source=share_petition

The Eternal Feminine in "Blue is the Warmest Color"

While doing research for my group presentation on The Mad Women of TV, I have been reading Denise Russell's book, Women, Madness, and Medicine. In her chapter "Feminist Philosophies of Women and Madness," she talks about Luce Irigaray's theory on women's sexuality and madness. Russell paraphrases Irigaray saying that "identity is tied up with sexuality and that under patriarchy women's sexuality has been conceptualized under male terms" and is therefore repressed and silenced through the linguistic and logical process that structure thought (117). The idea of women's inability to express sexual pleasure and desire because of a patriarchal linguistic structure made me think about Blue is the Warmest Color, a movie I have yet to see but have read a handful of critical articles about. Namely, Manhola Dargis' article The Trouble with 'Blue is the Warmest Color', which articulates her issues about the film's so-called "progressive" sex scenes.

I started to think about the patriarchal system that the film industry has become and similar to Irigaray's thoughts on the inability for women to express sexuality in language, Blue is the Warmest Color is connected to the lack of filmic female sexual expression from a female point of view. Dargis' argument against Abdellatif Kechiche's European art film specifically discusses his male point of view and its influences on expressing female sexuality. She mentions Julie Maroh's (who wrote the graphic novel the movie is based) critique of there being no lesbians on set and elaborates this farther saying the movie lacks "women of any kind." She describes the protagonist's, Adele, sexual appetite as "contained, prettified, and aestheticized."

She goes on to say that "women's silence is deafening and, like the movie's sex scenes, punctures the movie's realism" describing a scene where a man basically mansplains (lol) that "'art by women never tackles female pleasure'" to a group of women who have nothing to say back to him (such as female artists were historically not allowed to work with nude models Dargis aptly points out). Her discussion of the film relates to the idea of a patriarchal system that has contained female expression through male-conceptualized language structures such as film. Kechiche's directorial expression of female sexuality is not invalid; it is an artist's statement. However, his gender and position should be taken into consideration regarding the aesthetic and narrative decisions made in depicting the characters and their lives. Irigaray's idea that sexuality has historically been conceptualized in male terms seems to stand true in cinema as well. The depiction of female sexuality in Blue is the Warmest Color must be considered for what it is: a European film director aching to explore the mystique of female sexuality, which, let's face it, isn't as mystical as they think it is.

Outline

Project question: Do gay characters in television serve any purpose other than being gay?

In my paper, I plan to explore how gay characters in television are portrayed as being virtually identity-less and serve the sole purpose of being a homosexual character. The character’s main struggle always has something to do with the fact that he or she is gay, no matter what the show’s storyline entails. I intend to draw examples from shows such as Glee, Ellen, and The Office. I also intend to argue that although shows may think they are being pro-gay by including these characters, producers are actually taking a major step back in the fight for gay rights by mentioning either directly or indirectly that the character is indeed gay. Straight characters in television face complex problems that can revolve around their financial status, issues in the workplace or with family, etc. It seems, however, that gay characters are only faced with issues that have something to do with them being gay. I want to explore why this is.

If You Are Looking To Become An Ideal Wife, This Is A MUST READ

Thestepfordwife.com

“Stepford Wives Organization is a website that supports the idea of the homemaking wife who is not only the cheery domestic goddess, but a fantastic dresser, neat as a pin, a lady with good manners, and a gracious, well-behaved, obedient wife who always puts her man first.”

I am choosing to blog about this website as it is applicable to my group project, and is also incredibly fascinating! Similar to shows like “breaking amish” and “sister wives” that give us an insight into the lives of serious minorities, this website is a peephole into the lives of the group of inidivduals who, in a 21^st century fairly equal society, work tirelessly to regress to anti-feminist roots. This site interestingly takes screenshots for the movie “The Stepford Wives” as visual models for how women should act and dress. “The Stepford Wives” was so obviously a social commentary about exactly why we should not conform to historical ideals, so I find it genuinely  funny that the creators of this website have so obviously missed the point. It is also very contradictory at times; it states “Stepfordwives.org recommends you to switch between lingerie styles, always remembering to keep it tasteful and never stray into gaudiness. Whatever you decide on, just make sure that allure always take priority over comfort. Pleasing our men should be our first concern, and there's no better place to do it than in the bedroom.” Written next to images of sexy lingerie that are similar to items that could be bought at Victoria’s Secret, I find it hugely comical that this website can actually say that they promote classiness and modesty. If you have time I highly recommend looking at this site, as the content (especially if you have seen “The Stepford Wives”) gives a really insightful experience into the psyche of a group of incredibly regressive women. 

Representation of the Homosexual "Sidekick"

For my CTCS 412 teaching projects, my group will be focusing on queer representation in the media and I will be discussing the relationship of the gay male best friend character that is seen in modern day prime-time television series. I will predominantly be looking at shows with a white, cisgendered, heterosexual protagonist that happens to have a gay-identified best friend. My work will focus mainly around these ideas:

-       Gender identity (Ex. If the character is a homosexual male, does he posses a more effeminate or masculine personality?)

-       Sexual relationship thought the show (Ex. Is the character monogamous, polyamorous, or viewed as asexual?)

-       Humor (Ex. Is the character’s sexuality being targeted –i.e. is the character being laughed at or with?)

-       Coming out (Ex. At any point during the duration of the show does the character come out and how does the protagonist and other supporting characters react?)

My shows of focus will consist of (but will not be limited to): Kurt Hummel from Glee, Jack McFarland from Will & Grace, and Max Blum from Happy Endings. By coming these ideas to modern queer television character, the reader can then deduct if the image of the homosexual created by the media reflects the same ideals of the LGBT community and what effect this may have on how non-LGBT identifying viewers may possibly view homosexuality.

Failing Boys Discourse and Post-Feminism

            Post-feminism and the complications in educational achievement was the premise of Jessica Ringrose’s article “Successful girls? Complicating post-feminist, neoliberal discourses of educational achievement and gender equality.” The “failing boys” discourse she describes in her article stems from a discourse that grew in popularity in the mid 1990s. This discourse is based upon the idea of girls superiority in educational achievements compared to boy’s achievements. As Betty Francis argues “Girls’ success is continuously framed through an oppositional dynamic of boys’ failure, and the enormous complexity of educational issues involved in struggling for ‘equality’ greatly muddied.”

            What is most interesting and equally frustrating to me about this article is that there is this contradiction between this proliferation of post-feminist stories and representations in which girls are seen as successful (academically speaking that is) and the idea that this success that is continuously framed around the academic failure of boys. As Ringrose states, “…the debate on gender and achievement is framed through a narrow binary conception of gender so that the unitary category of ‘girl ‘is simplistically pitted against the unitary category of boy.’” While reading, I couldn’t help but think of how post-feminist this situation is. There is this idea that gender equality is simply gone. The success of girls however has initiated this gender crisis in which society must save boys from the power and intelligence of girls. The academic success of boys or lack there of is, in this argument, the fault of women. This fails to bring to light that their academic performance might not be so much a gendered issue but could be the result of other factors that lead to their lower rankings. Overall, what I would like to see is this situation switched. Would there be a sudden “failing girls” discourse if girls academically performed worse than boys?

Response to page 476 of the Ringrose article

            Jessica Ringrose’s article is really mind-blowing. I say this particularly in response to the quote on page 476, which explains that the downfall of boys’ learning abilities and success in school is due to “feminization of the education system.” It is so incredibly backwards that someone could believe the male youth was having a difficult time learning because “teachers were forbidden to use ‘sexist’ language” in the classroom and because male teachers could no longer bond through humor or football in the presence of female students. Is it a good thing that boys require sexist language to do well in school? I would say that it is not. In this situation, girls are blamed for the overall underachievement of the opposite sex. Even when females are displaying an impressive ability of learning, growing and succeeding, it is seen in a negative light. It seems that women are constantly denied the applause they deserve, as they are either perceived as too weak or too strong with no accepted middle-ground. On the flip side, in this case, the weakness of the male is the fault of the female, which eliminates the need to consider that there may be a limitation in the male gender. And it seems that in society there is no such thing as a “too strong” man. So men get to be seen as the all-powerful, and if there is any indication of females having an advantage, it is turned into a fault. Thus, women, in this case, are stuck in a lose-lose situation where there seems to be no hope for resolve.