AED 812 Difference

After watching “What a Girl Wants” by Hodgson and Earp, I couldn’t help but think about how the interviewed girls saw and heard the media of the 1990’s and 2000’s in the exact way I saw it. I too idolized Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and inherited many ideas from them. I’ve carried the messages about gender codes and expectations through adolescence into adulthood, constantly doubting the way I looked as a result of the media I absorbed. I started to think about how the cool things and lifestyles that are being “sold” on MTV and now in the universe of streaming videos and music on Youtube and the like. These images, lyrics, and videos are still being seen and digested by impressionable children with similar messages about how women should look, what their roles on society are, and how they should be treated.... often with less adult supervision. I took the image of a young girl in front of the television and used the spotlight technique to center the viewer on a screenshot from the music video “Slippery” by the Migos on the screen she is engaging with. In the video, there are a plethora of attractive women, some with large breasts and butts but all with little swimsuits, stellar bodies, professional make-up and well-done hair. They are always around the male artists in a pool and mansion setting serving as the eye candy of the video. Objectification of women seems to be getting more blatant, or maybe I am more aware. It communicates to girls that if you look this way, men will want you around. These codes dicussed in “The Codes of Gender - Identity & Performance in Popular Culture” through the work of Erving Goffman explain how women are continually being portrayed as submissive, sensitive, and weak. They splash and play like young girls, touch one another, put their fingers to their mouths, lay and lounge around, and twerk their butts. It says that maybe if you’re a sexy enough decoration (human being), maybe you can hang out in the house of a celebrity, have nice jewelry, and other pleasures too (sex, drugs, drink). I can’t tell you how many of my young girl students of just 12 years old want to show the boys and girls in their class that they can twerk just like the girls in the music videos. The main way this changes the narrative discussed in “What a Girl Wants” is how now widely available all content is all times of the day as opposed to during a select time spot on cable TV. There’s likely more bombardment and pressure for young girls to take on these codes as their own.

“The Codes of Gender - Identity & Performance in Popular Culture” thoroughly examined countless advertisements, and one in particular stood out to me- one by Dolce and Gabbana where a woman looks like she is being pinned down and there is a group of muscular men closing in around her. If you were glancing at it while flipping through a magazine you might be say to yourself, “Oh, oily bodies in the sun- sexy.” However, if you really look at it, the ad is outright disturbing like a rape scene with many men. I choose to reposition the man and woman from the advertisement into a workplace. The man is now pushing the woman down on top of a conference room table. I intended it to quickly connect all viewer’s minds to the recent events of many women coming forward to face their sexual assaulters in the Me Too movement. With the codes of women as weak and submissive, many of the accused men have been playing on these codes in attempts to defend themselves. I think if this kind of imagery is normalized in visual culture, it can often become normalized in all settings of our lives, even the workplace where people are expected to act professionally. I feel a sense of pride and strength hearing the many survival stories of courageous women in the media. As the consumers and listeners of the media, we must demand something different from the companies that market our products.

As someone who was taught the traditional line of history in a public school in the United States of America, I know there are countless other perspectives that were entirely left out of my education; “How Racism Harms White Americans” presented by John Bracey floored me. I learned pieces of history I never knew and made connections that I never would have on my own about how white people have historically screwed themselves over in the refusal to bind and collaborate with minorities, specifically black people. It further baffles me that the hate is still burning up like some fresh acid reflux in our ugly country. A lot of things have unfolded since the 2016 election- things that have made me ashamed, fearful, weak, and angry. I didn’t know there were still so many hateful white people. I overlayed text overtop of an image from the Neonazi action in Charlottesville last year. It reads “The United States of Whiteness.” I choose ‘whiteness,’ because for centuries white people have destroyed the lives of and/or continually oppressed the Native Americans, African Americans, Middle Easterners, Latinos, and others. The neonazis think the USA is for white people. The privilege that white people have sustained is still present and working. However, demographics are changing, and within decades, white people will be a minority. I hope my sarcastic satire to hits the viewers hard, even people who believe that whiteness rules. Everyone who sees this should recognize the ridiculousness and surely know that the United States is for everyone. If we cannot learn to work together like Bracey infers, this country is still young and cannot work the way it has been forever.