Blog #9

"Killing Us Softly"
The media has perpetuated gender roles since advertisement has existed especially during the 1950's and after. We spend 3 years of our lives watching advertisements on television which is outrageous. The majority of the time nowadays I either laugh at who absurd and odd commercials are or how stereotypical they are. Advertising tells our youth what they should strive to be or at least that is how young people interpret it whether or not they admit to affected by the images. Women are made into objects, parts of a woman are focused on in advertisements especially the breasts and the buttocks. Women in advertisement are never a subject. They always are always told they need to change their body image in all sorts of ways. This systematic approach to advertisement has left us with the indisputable link between sexism, sexual violence and the like because companies just want to make more money by selling their products. It is even worse if you are a black woman because they are portrayed in the media as objects or subhuman even more than are white women.
Does this system of advertisement support patriarchy? Absolutely! The media creates a stereotypical ideal of what it is to be a women. Therefore, if a woman does not fit that standard, then they are less of a woman. Also, if a woman fits that body type, they are never respected for anything beyond their beauty for the most part. I have no problem admitting that I have and still do associate with men who treat women as objects and nothing more, which is horrible I admit, but I do not know how to change their minds, not because I cannot relay the reality to them, I just fear they are too ignorant and would not understand. Why? It is because we learn these impossible ideals at such a young age that it seems so impossible to change their narrow-minded ideals.
When I try to think of a more diverse example of gender, my first instinct is to resort to the music industry. I do not know if this can be an example but I will give it a shot: Marilyn Manson. His entire music career is based on a queer gender identity. One extreme example from his book "The Long Hard Road Out of Hell" he states that if you preform oral sex on another man but do not get aroused it is not gay and you are only doing a service much like the way our economy is a service industry and no longer industrial for the most part. Another example I can think of are the recent images in Dove advertisements that show women of different body types besides the professional models and showing them in a happy and positive light. However the advertisements still portray women in the American feminine gender role.