Jackie Sobel UTK Women Studies

Blog designed for the purpose of blog posting for UTK's Women In The Media course: WOST235

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Blog 6: Revisiting the beginning

On the first day of class we were prompted to write a short essay answering two questions: “How would you define feminism” and “Are you a feminist?”

My responses basically were that I didn’t really know very much about feminism, not enough to consider myself a feminist. Here are two excerpts from my essay that I’d like to address.

In reference to “how would you define feminism?” I said: “while it has a focus of ensuring that women are viewed and treated as equals, I see it and learned it as a realm of equality for all” I still agree with this statement, perhaps even more so than before. Just by virtue of the course work we have covered over the semester, I learned that feminism covers all realms of equality, not just women’s.

In reference to “are you a feminist?”, I said: “I do not consider myself a feminist mostly because I feel that I lack the knowledge on the subject to be able to claim to be”. I now disagree with this statement, I have learned so much this semester, that I without a doubt consider myself to be a feminist. Because I cannot unsee the gendered stereotypical manifestations that are in the media. I’ve learned to interrogate

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Media Recommendation: The publication of victim’s names.

I want to highlight an article published in the NY Times back in 1989 that speaks about representation and disclosure of rape victim’s names in the media. It’s an old article, however I think it is a significant read given the current climate within the university with sexual assault cases. While it is a controversial topic to discuss, I think it highlights some very good points and counter arguments for keeping names private.

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/25/us/naming-rape-victim-is-still-a-murky-issue-for-the-press.html

According to this article, in the United States, only 5 to 10 percent of newspapers report victim’s names. This draws the question: what would the value in publishing victim’s names be?

First, a point made in the article: as quoted by a representative from the Mason-Shelton Journal from Washington, 'It seems unfair to me with the presumption of innocence to report one party of a trial and not the other,'' … ''You're not doing your duty if you make an exception.''. The point here being that if our law follows that an individual is innocent until proven guilty, withholding the victims name but not the accused is essentially publicly saying that the “victim” is innocent and the accused is not. It is a public sentencing without regard to the legal case. So, regardless of whether the accused is found innocent, they will always have the public sentencing, whereas the victim, even if they may be lying, does not suffer any such ramifications.

Secondly, a point that the Mason-Shelton Journal also subscribes to is the point of stigmatization of being a rape victim.  Its an old fashioned and religious stigma that women who have been raped are ‘damaged goods’, no longer pure, not clean, not as desirable. I think the argument can be made that if special privacy is not provided to rape victims, the stigmatization over time could reasonably be eliminated. It would take a few generations of reconditioning, but wouldn’t we rather teach our young girls that being raped is nothing to be ashamed of? They already suffer enough, why perpetuate an environment that is not supportive of a rape victim? So I ask, could publication of victim’s names actually be beneficial?

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How do women utilize media when it comes to consumer decisions.

In thinking about how women use media, I thought about the utility of the internet. What utility does it have that women use. For my media example, I selected a Trip Advisor review that was recently left for the hotel I work at. This Trip Advisor review was left by a female guest who stayed the night at our hotel and had some negative interactions with some cat-calling construction workers who were also staying:

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g55138-d105652-Reviews-Quality_Inn_Merchants_Drive-Knoxville_Tennessee.html#review_359994978

The title of the review reads “don't go if you're a female solo traveler!”. The reviewer proceeds to detail how the property was “the scariest place” and that she feared “some kind of assault” so she just locked herself in the room all night and didn’t sleep at all!

Upon seeing this review I first asked why the she stayed the night at our property if she felt so unsafe.. but that’s a conversation. I then asked how damaging this review would be for our property. Who would be the target audience of this post? Women of course. So then I wondered how many women actually would read this Trip Advisor review.

According to experimental data from Bae and Lee(2010), when it comes to utilization of consumer reviews, women are more likely than men to utilize and be effected by online consumer reviews, when it comes to purchase intention. This, I find interesting in the face of a typical gender stereotype that frames women as impulsive and men as calculated and rational.

Additionally, Bae and Lee (2010) found that women are more likely to be effected by negative reviews than positive reviews.  

 In other words, this review isn’t so great for us...

Questions:

Why do you think that women are more likely to be consumers of online reviews?

Consumer reviews are notoriously biased; i.e. they are often deceptive and misleading. If women are more likely than men to pay attention to consumer reviews, do you think that this means women are more easily deceived and mislead than men?

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Blog 4: a swapping of gender stereotypes

The other night, my fiancé and I watched Amy Schumer’s new movie, Trainwreck. We noted an interesting new trend that has been appearing in films lately, one that on the surface seems positive, but may actually be more malicious than the original. It is a swapping of gender stereotypes.

We can see in Trainwreck the swapping occurs with the male characters being overly emotionally weak, crying, insecure, shallow, and in some portrayals, ditzy. Conversely, the female characters are strong and stereotypically male. The main character played my Amy Schumer mimics the male stereotype we see time and time again, where she is a maninizer(?) (female version of a womanizer), having one night stands every night, and drinking heavily with no desire to settle down, until she meets that one person who changes her life.

This stereotype swap certainly is limiting to the characters, and while it does challenge norms it doesn’t do anything to correct issue. In fact I would argue that it could serve to make it worse, just by virtue of it’s absurdity. While I think Amy Schumer is a great celebrity representative in the feminism community, I think this response to gender stereotype served a dis-service. In a way I feel that the fire was fought with too much fire, which served the result of backfiring (fire fire fire). I say this because instead of adjusting to make it gender stereotype neutral, the stereotypes were swapped, and the result was ridiculous. It made a mockery essentially of the gender stereotypes that occurs. And in a way it almost cements the idea that the original gender stereotype is the ‘right way’ to portray characters in film.

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Blog 3: media consumption and distaste

Positive: I want to begin with my first example of my relationship to media with the same way that I did my presentation blog: When I grow up, I want to be Leslie Knope (Parks and Recreation). As much as I would like to say that I'm not influenced by the media, I definitely am. Example being that I do admittedly try to model my appearance and oftentimes my mannerisms after female characters I see in media. Leslie Knope's character is a very strong, professional, yet perky and quirky. She has qualities that I strive towards; to look professional, to be driven in my aspirations, to joke around and be funny while doing so. She is a great role model for how this combination can be properly executed. 

Negative: One aspect of media that somewhat psychologically effects me is the amount of sex in television. Everything is so sexualized. There is sex in nearly every show. It seems as if television producers need to put the sex in to keep ratings up. An example of this is one of my favorite shows, Fringe, a Sci-Fi almost X-Files-esque show that has nothing to do with sex. The first episode of the series begins with epic sci-fi drama, getting ready to lead somewhere epic, and then insert sex scene that is not relevant to the plot, followed super cool Sci-Fi stuff. The episode would have been epic without the sex scene. I feel so inundated in my daily life with unrealistic and in-opportunistic sex scenes, that the media makes me feel like I'm supposed to be having super hot sex like all the time in my real life. And if I imagine that I'm a young girl learning about real-life from the media, I would get a seriously skewed view about the priorities of life.

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UTK Women in the Media Blog 2

I did not attend high school, so I feel that I had a little bit of a different experience and perception of the media than most girls my age. I assume that young girls would throw back and forth to each other and sort of enforce the ideals that were portrayed by the media, but I didn’t really have that since my brother was my only classmate. That being said, I feel as if the media influenced my understanding of gender with a much bigger impact than it did to other girls my age. I essentially looked to the media to find out what I should look like, how I should act, how high school students interacted with each other-  despite the fact that we all know that what is not TV is nothing like the real thing. Shows like Boy Meets World and whatever movie was on the Disney Channel gave me the perspective of what I was missing in High School. It looked really fun! I saw absolutely no studying on them, but lots of flirting, and girls trying to prove themselves to earn the love of the boys they crushed on. I watched shows like Charmed to find out what being an adult woman was like. I did the best I could to emulate the wardrobe and flirty but powerful persona of the Charmed girls. Hard lesson, but funny story, while wearing my Alyssa Milano persona (at age13), I was once called a hooker walking down the street.

My point with the story is that the gender expectations and representations were just ridiculous and fake and unattainable – unless you wanted to be called out as a hooker, which by the way, what 13 year old wants that?! I was devastated when I just tried to be like “everyone else”.

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The Power of the Menimist Movement

https://youtu.be/r6bcs8ln_9Q?t=17s

Let me first start with saying that when I grow up, I want to be Leslie Knope..

So the clip above from Parks and Recreation is a parody of a certain male reaction to the misunderstanding of feminism, and a new men’s rights movement, Menimism. After watching this episode I turned to the internet to see if this “menimist” movement was actually a thing, and it is! If you look up #Menimist on twitter you will get a whole slew of tweets:

Ranging from double standards:

to asking for their own special considerations in this opressing world:

And of course, reminding us that Feminism is the worst creation ever:

And let’s not forget that we have to have the obligatory joke about rape:

Interestingly, most of the posts are about dating or partying, and sex, or looks. None of it dives deeper to the core of the issue; power, success, career related equality, human rights?

From what I have seen, while it is satirical, this menimist movement seems to be a response to women asking for special considerations in order to be considered equal to men… except we are omitting the last part and just keeping and amplifying the “special considerations” part. Though people say they are joking, you can tell they aren’t.

So what does this all have to do with power? It has to do with a brushing off of feminist concepts in our daily lives. It exemplifies how the devaluation and mockery of a drive for equality occurs. How can serious change be achieved if it’s not being taken seriously?

I think that feminism is highly misunderstood and as a result, men feel the need to belittle it rather than understand it. It re-frames the fact that the public is unaware of what feminism is about. Feminism is about equality for all and for women to obtain concessions to have the same opportunities that men do.

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Women's Studies Blog 1: Thoughts on Miss Representation

I start with high school student, Maria; She has a younger sister who “cuts herself because she gets teased at school because she doesn’t have the perfect body”. This really struck me how much the media is affecting not only girls ideas about how they should look, but also boys. This idea is so powerful that young girls are being teased about it. This ideal of identity undoubtedly leads us to the media, it not just tells us, but shows us what is ideal, what is perfect, and even what is ugly. This representation is important to the audience because as Kierney points out in our textbook, children spend more time watching television than they do in the classroom. Television plays such a big role in our lives, that it is hardly surprising that it would so strongly shape how we perceive the world.

So, how can media representations be addressed and changed?  It would take a two-fold effort. We (media mostly) need to first change our attitude about women, and about what women can do and how intelligent they are. I chuckled when I saw the news segment when the male anchor said “you could water board Nancy Pelosi and she still wouldn’t admit to plastic surgery”. We need to address statements like this and ask ‘why does it matter if the congresswoman has plastic surgery?! Shouldn’t we be focusing on the efforts she is making in the humanitarian realm rather than the fashion realm?’. Once we can change our attitudes about women, we can then see them moving up and into positions of power. I think it would need to occur in this order because, as Gavin Newsom pointed out after he promoted women into positions of police chief and fire chief of San Francisco, “the incredible opposition was coming mostly from women, and those that feel it’s too much, too soon, too fast”. This is because our media is creating an environment where it is not yet safe for women to hold these positions, while activists cry out for equality in positions of power JUST like this.