Pop Culture...

What is “Pop Culture”? How does it affect women and they way that they think? Well, to begin with pop culture is any cultural production that has a mass audience; its many forms of expression and communication that the majority of the population could have access to – this could include movies, tv, dance, plays, music, books etc.. In class we watched a movie called Beyond Killing Us Softly, this was a movie about how media images impact girls and women. It really opened my eyes to a whole lot of stuff that I have never really thought about before, even though I’ve probably seen examples of it all thousands of times....

Over time ads have gotten worse and worse. In most ads men are seen as masculine, strong and active where as many women are seen as vulnerable, soft and gentle – not to mention the fact that in many ads show women in various sexual poses, this depicts the message that women are sexual objects. I bet, for at least 9 out of 10 ads containing women, if you took the text out it would resemble a snapshot from a pornography film.

Take these two ads for example. When you first look at them you see the womens' bodies, THEN you see what the actual ad is all about, a fragrance for men. So why is it a woman’s body in the ad for mens' fragrance? Because that’s what society has come down to, this idea of women as sexual objects is all over today’s advertisement.

Take a look at a few more pictures:  

  

One ad that totally blew my mind away was this one shown below, mainly because for the first 45 seconds I couldn’t figure out what the actual ad is trying to sell. Then I saw it. See that little tiny red car underneath the woman’s buttocks? Yep, it’s an ad for matchbox cars. Again, showing the woman in a sexual position thus making her vulnerable and some sort of sexual deviant.

All these ads degrading towards women and their body, they make little girls think that they HAVE to look this way otherwise guys won’t like them. Advertising is an underlying cultural message that feeds into many eating disorders because young women believe that what you weigh determines what your worth.  You rarely ever see women who are overweight, too short or too tall in media images, the women in the advertisement images of today are perfect in all aspects. “If women do not conform to the narrow object of beauty they then become a topic of laughter” – basically saying if you don’t look like those women in the media images, then you will be ridiculed because you aren’t “perfect”.

*All images were retrieved from Google Images *

Analyzing my Class Background...

Have you ever really analyzed your class background? And by class I don’t mean school...I mean the social rank according to income, wealth, status and power. Well, today we had to complete a “Class Background Inventory” sheet and once finished we had to compare it to the woman who was seated next to us. So quietly I read the first question, prepared to answer it. “When you were growing up, what was your family’s source(s) of income?”Oh man, maybe I wasn’t so eager to answer these questions, they all seemed so deep and kind of personal, but I gave it a shot. After answering all 8 questions I felt overwhelmed and kind of depressed, because I realized that even though my parents did everything they could while both me and my brother were growing up, we were just barely getting by...basically we were living a life of pay check to pay check. At first I wasn’t so keen on sharing my class background with the woman sitting next to me, I felt a little ashamed of it all. However, after we both had spoke about the first question I realized that, we were kinda in the same boat; which I was very relieved to have found out. We both grew up in the same financial situation, we had all the “cool stuff” even though our parents couldn’t really afford it, both our families rented houses rather than owning them and many of our family values were very similar. This was almost a moment of an epiphany, I shouldn’t feel ashamed for the way that I was brought up, my parents did the best they could given the situation. Society makes it quite difficult for many people to be a part of higher classes, even if you may be white and privileged. It’s a hard concept for me to understand, why there has to be this division between the different socio-economic ranks, because leading from the different classes comes many forms of oppression. As I read in an article that was assigned to us, “[c]lass is a political and economic structure as well as an ideological one, The other oppressions are the building tools; class is the wall. The other oppressions are cause and effect; class is the resulting structure.” (Bishop, 2002). So it isn’t just as simple as determining which social class you are a part of, but dealing with all the oppressions that come along with it. But should it be like that? I think not. There shouldn’t be any sort of class differences in the first place.

References:

Bishop, A. (2002). Becoming an ally: Breaking the cycle of oppression, 2 Ed. Halifax, N.S.: Fernwood Publishing

This cartoon shows that it is usually the lower class who gets affected from all the tragedies the upper class has made (http://trcs.wikispaces.com/social+classes)

Rebellious guy dreams of becoming a regular guy. (http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/s/social_class.asp)