Not that I blame them. "Them" being the rapers that rap with foul language, or the women that show way too much cleavage. It is as if someone came up to you one day and said: "This is how you get noticed. This is how to make people like you.". Only that someone is the media and the media transforms all the minds of its society, making this ideology partly true.
Males run the media. Therefore male power is portrayed in the media. Bell Hooks suggests that while males brainwash the people of lower social status then them.
Madonna preached female power, but then got sold out in a world of sex. By portraying women in a way that they are slaves to the male sexual desires is giving them a lesser power. Madonna originated as a powerful, righteous women and transformed into a sex object.
Therefore, I do agree with Hook’s assertions. People learn through what they see and if what they see is a powerful woman only obtaining her power through her sexuality, than that is what they believe it to be. Over and over again we are showed sexist images and over and over again we brainwashed to believed these are the norm.
In movies like This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated it’s clear that the American media favors violence over sex. So if a man sees a Christina Aguilera or a Madonna expressing herself sexually and calls that woman a whore or a slut is that woman a whore or a slut? Or is it a situation where the man’s sense of societal rules is being questioned?
ReplyDeleteWhy is everyone soley blaming the media? While I agree that they amplefy to the 100th degree most of our beleifs, it is the people who are also at fault for demanding it. If you want filth, they will sell you filth.
ReplyDeleteThis is what why we have the Internet, to give a free voice to the oppressed.
Part of the complexity here is that Madonna, I think, partly wanted to challenge the puritanical aspects of American society in regards to sex and sexuality. She perhaps wanted to show women as sexual agents who are in charge of their own sense of erotic power. However, in a patriarchal society, how do we even differentiate feminist visions of empowered female sexuality from masculinist denigrations that present women as objects? That line is not always clear, and people like Madonna profit off of this ambivalence. Like other popular culture performers, Madonna's "art" often seems most concerned with the accumulation of capital rather than striving to better our society and culture in progressive ways.
ReplyDelete@poip
ReplyDeleteI very much do agree that the media is derived from what people want to see. The media uses material that acts as somewhat of a time line of what its audience can handle- being shocking without being inappropriate.
I do think that since the media is mostly run by white males, the material is created to mostly satisfy what white males in the audience desire to see, leaving the rest of us as objects taking a role in this fantasy.