Video Games & American Culture » March 31st: Feminist Perspectives and Politics

March 31st: Feminist Perspectives and Politics

Video Game Essay Due next week on Canvas–April 7th
Also, don’t forget to do your Weekly Canvas Post…I know you’ve already set your calendar reminders

Plan of Attack

  • Any more from our realism discussion
  • Naomi Wolf’s “The Beauty Myth”
    • I originally had a not-so-nice copy of this chapter on Canvas but updated the file
  • Women’s Images in Media
  • Gloria Steinem’s “Why Younger Women are More Conservative”
  • Video Game Essay (Due Next Week)
    • Don’t pad your essays with long quotations and/or images
    • You don’t need to double space your heading or triple space between paragraphs
    • The 7- or 9-page requirement is for your analysis
    • Works Cited and References don’t count towards the page requirement

How not to think about Feminism

Some might argue that feminist scholars are seeing a conspiracy theory, and they just blow things out of proportion. That’s too reductive an explanation. The authors are showing us (with various levels of success) that the media we consume are products of the culture.

We have illusions of gender that the media replicate that we wish to hold onto. We will discuss–at length I hope–gender as an expression. Arguments against transgender individuals don’t hold up when we consider gender an expression. The Constitution of the United States allows for freedom of speech, religion, and expression.

The Beauty Myth

How does a woman achieve the socially constructed status that is beauty?

Some specific points about “the beauty myth”:

  • p. 10: “a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement: the beauty myth.”
  • pp.10-11: “…contemporary backlash….has grown stronger to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity no longer can manage.”
    • Wolf published this in 1991, so things have changed, right?
  • p. 10: Wolf argues that women’s political and social gains–including reproductive freedoms–played a role in creating the beauty myth.
  • p. 12: “The beauty myth tells a story: The quality called ‘beauty’ objectively and universally exists.”
    “None of this is true. ‘Beauty’ is a currency system like the gold standard.”
  • p. 14: Women in competition.
  • p.16: “The modern arsenal of the myth….is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women’s freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about [women’s] liberation–latent fears that we might be going too far.”
  • p.18: “An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slave that ‘justify’ the institution of slavery. Western economics are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women.”
    • Is it fair for Wolf to compare unequal pay to the institution of slavery?
  • p. 19: “That resurrected caricature [an unflattering image of a feminist], which sought to punish women for their public acts by going after their private sense of self, became the paradigm for new limits placed on aspiring women everywhere.”

Unlike Gloria Steinem’s visit to UNC Charlotte, I found Naomi Wolf’s talk here to reveal a less-than-critical stance on women in heterosexual relationship. She also was borderline abortion shaming and advocated a slut-shaming stance by defending women covering themselves up. She visited in 2010 if memory serves.

Women’s Bodies on Sale

Maybe I read too much into things, but I see so many romantic comedies ending the same way–marriage and/or children. In fact, it’s not even just romantic comedies: there are countless shows and films that follow the “boy meets girl” format. What do we think about this romantic pattern?

Right about now is when we start talking about double standards. The authors we’ve read recently point out that men don’t have the same stigmas attached to them or the same expectations:

  • Things to think about as you contemplate our gender analysis discussions:
    • What are some roles and expectations that women have but men don’t or, at least, don’t have to the same extent?
    • Where do these roles or expectations show up? Be specific. Don’t just say “the media”–that’s a given in this class.
  • Let’s review a discussion on Language and Hegemony.
    • Have you ever thought about language and how it replicates hegemonic practices? What’s the word for a promiscuous female?
    • How about a male?
    • Check out the definition for the word ‘slut’ (if you’re on campus, check out the OED’s expanded definition). What’s the double standard in that word?
  • Where else do ideal(ized) images get reproduced?

Here’s an interesting look at Breastaurants and another one. There’s even an NPR story on Breastaurants.–brings new meaning to economic “bust” (by the way, that’s not my clever joke; it’s in the article). There was a short-lived male version called Tallywackers.

Gloria Steinem’s “Why Younger Women are More Conservative”

Gloria Steinem focuses her attention in this essay on young women. She tells us that young women are more conservative–more likely to go along with the status quo–because they are “in the stage most valued by male-dominant cultures” (230). While you’re free to disagree with her argument, let’s try to consider “the rhetoric of young, conventionally beautiful women” in American culture.

She signed a book for me 26 years ago…almost to the day!

Some specific points about Steinem’s article:

  • p. 230: “As students, women are probably treated with more equality than we ever will be again. For one thing, we’re consumers.”
  • p. 230: Young women “have [their] full potential as workers, wives, sex partners, and childbearers.”
  • p. 232: Women “worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career” while college students.
  • p. 232: Women “are still brainwashed into assuming that [they] are dependent on men for [their] basic identities.”
  • p. 233: “Society tries hard to convert women into ‘man junkies’; that is, into people who are addicted to male-approval and presence.”
  • p. 233: Young women may “refrain from identifying themselves as ‘feminist.'”
  • pp. 235-236: “We have to uproot the sexual caste system that is the most pervasive power structure in society, and this means transforming the patriarchal values of those who run the institutions, whether they are politically the “right” or the “left,” the fathers or the sons.

That last quote is important because Steinem isn’t reducing her argument to a trite Democratic vs Republican argument. Patriarchy pervades both.

Videos for the Weekly Discussion Post

Time permitting, we’ll watch the videos for this week’s post:

Kilbourne on Images of Women in the Media

This isn’t required viewing but might be of interest.

I have a link to Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women (45 min) from the Media Education database available through Atkins Library. You should be able to watch it if you’re signed in.

Jean Kilbourne’s lecture on images of women in the media has been revised and re-presented for nearly 40 years. If we were to locate her thesis, it would be, roughly, that advertisements condition our feelings–consciously and unconsciously–of what it means to be a woman or a man. Additionally, she points out that although men are sometimes objectified, it’s women who suffer the most from advertising’s objectification.

{Of course, just like what we discussed concerning technology from a social perspective, what influences what? Does the media influence our perceptions of femininity and masculinity, or does society influence the media’s (re)presentations of femininity and masculinity.}

Some specific points about how advertisements “use” women:

  • Women are often shown as submissive, silent, and docile.
  • The images of women are often of manufactured or spliced-together body parts of women.
  • Also, the supermodels or “typical” models are a small percentage of the population but appear as the norm because the type is repeated constantly.
  • There appears to be a recurring pattern of infantilization of women and a sexualization of young girls in advertising.
  • Kilbourne believes that many ads show violence against women (both explicitly and implicitly), which goes along with the preponderance of domestic violence and rape of women in society as a whole.
  • In many ads, men are shown as powerful
  • Most ads conform to (hetero)normative white standards of beauty or power. Women of color seem to be “silenced” and dehumanized more according to Kilbourne.
  • Most importantly, (I guess I could be biased…) Kilbourne points out that we’re no longer citizens but consumers. Who else claims that?

Although there may be some disagreement, Kilbourne is not the only one who makes the argument that images of women in the media influence how women and girls see themselves. Additionally, she provides empirical evidence for Naomi Wolf’s idea of the beauty myth that women are supposed to conform to in patriarchal society.

I’ve shown or directed students to Kilbourne’s lecture for nearly twenty years (I even watched the first or second one in college), and I’m amazed at the responses I get. I’m especially amazed at the defensive tone many male students have about Kilbourne’s argument. I’ve heard that she’s just a scorned feminist who’s “taking out her frustrations on men” to arguments that she is manipulating her evidence by choosing particularly suspect ads. However, the ads she shows are quite representative of images of women in the media. For examples, see the following “industry” websites:

One thing I have noticed about the images of women and girls on the magazine sites above that’s different from many of the images Kilbourne shows is that Kilbourne’s selection had many images of vulnerable, passive women and girls. While those images haven’t gone away entirely from my unscientific sampling of magazines (especially perfume/cologne ads), the above sites have an abundance of happy, active women and girls. Everything from new jeans to ice cream seems to make the models happy. I wonder what that says about advertising? These happy women and girls still conform to Kilbourne’s argument that petite, white, airbrushed models are the standard for conventionally beauty images. However, there has been a push for more representations–body size, skin color, neurodiversity–in advertising and modelling.

But her most airtight claim is about the ideal(ized) version of women digitally enhanced and manufactured: Take a look at this Dove commercial for a look at how to construct the “perfect” woman. They can do all kinds of things with Photoshop…makes us, once again, question what’s “real” in media.

Next Week

Obviously, this is a WGST class, so it’s not like we’re going to stop having discussions on gender and sexuality. We’ll be moving onto games of conquest, and I have a chapter from my video game book for you on Canvas. Don’t forget that your Video Game essay is due next week! It’s never too early to start looking ahead to the next assignment…