#feminsims

[hellochances]

important. (hello.lvndl)

[sorayachemaly]

Have you ever looked at the scale of Barbie shoes to Ken or GI Joe? 

It's a pretty good illustration of the complete obsession American marketers have with hyper-gender, especially in kids' toys, games and films.

Writing in Sociological Images Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, described the most recent verion in a post called: "Help, My Eyeball is Bigger than My Wrist! Gender Dimorphism in Frozen."

How bodies look and are used, how much space they take up, is important because of the ideas they convey. And the way they drive corporate profits. We spent billions of dollars (Disney alone makes in excess of $4 billion on the princess market) a year telling girls to take up less and less space. And we are telling boys to take up far more.  

We actually teach boys and men to take up as much space as possible, indeed actively splay themselves casually, in public. This physical ease in public space starts early and isn’t just a function of rambunctiousness. The way bodies take up space are territorial displays.

Every year, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, conducts studies about…gender in media. Consider these findings, which have been consistent for years:

“Females are almost four times as likely as males to be shown in sexy attire. Further, females are nearly twice as likely as males to be shown with a diminutive waistline. Generally unrealistic figures are more likely to be seen on females than males.

Males outnumber females 3 to 1 in family films. In contrast, females comprise just over 50% of the population in the United States. Even more staggering is the fact that this ratio, as seen in family films, is the same as it was in 1946.”

Or, these conclusions, recently reported in an ABC news report on the topic:

 “Twenty years ago, the average fashion model weighed 8% less than the average woman. Today, she weighs 23% less. ““Most runway models meet the body mass index criteria for anorexia.” This piece closed by pointing out that model Beverly Johnson, who hovered between a size 4 and 6 at the peak of her career in the '90s, would be considered plus-size today.

Girls are obsessing over thigh gaps and thinness, or sculpting their ladybits to look like Barbie’s, and dropping out of sports at twice the rate of boys by age 14,

Now look at what boys see. Big. Chiseled. Bulked up bodies. Like girls, they are deluged by visualizations of an unattainable-for-most idealized male form.

Boys are unhappy with their bodies, taking dangerous drugs, suffering from eating disorders. More than 40% of high school boys work out to increase their body mass.

Like girls, in greater and greater numbers, boys are experiencing a disconnect between how they look and what is healthy. We aren’t even talking about violence as a foundational constituent of how we define being a “real” man. Our ideas about masculinity are inseparably enmeshed with male physical dominance and brute strength. 

Just think about American football, the most popular sport in the country. It’s a festival of hypergender. The silhouettes of players and cheerleaders are totems of exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics, especially the men whose protective gear has gotten bigger and bigger so that they create a cartoonish male profile. If I wanted to go all conservative brain, Psych 101, bat-shit feminist on you, I'd point out that the silhouette of a cheerleader holding up pompoms in a classic V looks pretty much like a silhouette of women's reproductive organs. 

The imposition of these gender ideas starts at birth. A 2005 study found that parents of 3-year-olds worry that their boys don’t eat enough and that their girls eat too much. That is depressing beyond words.

So, visually, in our mass media—everything from cartoons to our top grossing movies—girls and women (generally speaking, thin and white) are physically diminished and boys and men are grossly expanded...in space, bodily. 

Visualized gender and race stereotypes represent, reflect, and create societal norms and interactions. And power dynamics. But, these distortions go far beyond the visual: We are saying to our girls, empty yourselves, lack substance, embody frailty, have no core or centrality. Be as small as possible and we will love you more. To boys we say, take up more room, more than is good for you or that you need. Be as big as possible. Fill yourself. Dominate space disproportionately. Go to a park, walk around and see how people are sitting in relationship to one another. This becomes even more blatant in the United States when you consider how, for women, ideas about thinness, fatness, and health are complicated by race. Our understanding and reporting of girls’ eating disorders and body expectations, ideas, and stereotypes are racially biased. As Alice Randall explained last year,  “Chemically, in its ability to promote disease, black fat may be the same as white fat. Culturally it is not.”

[tbhtumblah-blog]

SOMEONE LINK ME TO WHERE I CAN WATCH WHATS GOIING ON THE THING ON YOUTUBE ENDED

[empractices-rosephine]

The Feminist Critique of Art History

In a more conservative overview of the feminist art-historical situation, "Feminism:Has It Changed Art History?" Mary Garrard calls for the integration of women artists into the "regular art historical curriculum" and into standard art history textbooks, in order to avoid what she fears may become "a great cultural ghetto of our own devising." She points to two methods so far used to write about women artists. The first, a "lament from the ghetto," is to "compensate for the lack of scholarly attention to women artists' achievements by writing as apologists." The second, yet unexplored way, is "to approach the historic fact of discrimination against women from the other end -what has this politics of exclusion meant for male art?"208Her approach thus looks at art by women in light of its place in a male culture, as in her essay on Artemisia Gentileschi (1982). Garrard investigates the importance of the artist as an innovator in the tradition of a linear, male-oriented art history of successive and progressive innovations.

Gouma-Peterson. T. and Mathews, P.. (1987). The Feminist Critique of Art History. The Art Bulletin. 69 (3), 326-357.