In my opinion the big media corporation’s domination of music and movies is harmful. People are bombarded by one view point of perfection. They are only shown one version of the perfect woman, man, family, and lifestyle. Women are supposed to be docile, innocent, and skinny. From childhood they grow up watching movies showing happiness as finding a man to take care of them. Disney movies like “Snow White” and “Ariel” continually suggest that the way to get the perfect man is by being beautiful and helpless. Men are taught that they need to be a provider. They are shown that emotions are a weakness. In music videos such as “Candy Shop” by 50 Cent or “Boss’ Life” by Snoop Dog, men see women as seductresses and completely objectified; lips, legs, breasts. They are told that in the perfect nuclear lifestyle the men need to take care of their wife and be able to buy them expensive material things.
This mindset ingrained into people from childhood causes women to go to great lengths in trying to improve their bodies. Time and money are spent in this search for perfection. Lives are lost because of it. Women starve themselves, let surgeons cut open their skin, and even endure spousal abuse hoping to one day appeal to their soft side. On the other hand men are finding an outlet for their bottled emotions through the only acceptable means media presents to them, violence. They have already been conditioned to view women as pieces, as things. If being a man means not being sensitive then is it any surprise that when upset these troubled boys see no wrong in taking it out on women, on objects.
A single-minded point of view crushes diversity. When there is only the nuclear family being shown, other lifestyles become invisible. Living as a queer becomes stigmatized as abnormal. Without this way of life in the media people have trouble understanding and accepting it. We have a tendency to fear what we can’t comprehend. The only outlooks about the queer way of life that viewers get a glimpse of are ones that the big media corporations deem tolerable. Things like Katy Perry’s song “I Kissed a Girl” and characters like Jack in “Will and Grace”. In Katy’s song, being queer is presented as ok if it is done to impress a boyfriend. In “Will and Grace” Jack is shown to be flamboyant and promiscuous. Both these personas completely undermine the gay identity. It confirms stereotypes of the queer phase, experiment, or bad copy of heterosexual norm. These beliefs devastate the gay image. In this dominated media a homosexual relationship can only exist if there is a feminine and masculine character. When this model isn’t deviated from then that is all the viewer will be familiar with.
One also has to put on this list "Queer Eye" for its notion of a team of stereotypes. In a certain sense it is best to view "Queer Eye" as a Superhero Tv Series like Justice League, or Heroes. This proposition tells us troubling things about how our society figures homosexuality. The message then seems to be: "You can't fight crime--but you can redecorate someone's life"
ReplyDeleteI really like this post. In particular, I commend you on looking at media's impacts on men. Often times I think the societal pressures on men are often marginalized, which I find frustrating because I feel they can be just as great as those on women. Adding to the problem is that venues like "The Vagina Memoirs" are not available to men, and when they are, they focus only on how men impact women. However, even if such venues did exist, they are unlikely to succeed such discussions are given the feminine label.
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