Advertising Women

I was browsing the internet today looking for any interesting articles that talked about women and the media. I came across this one and found it to be very factual, and with a lot of good information about the media's influences. The link is below.
http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/women_beauty.cfm

The first thing that caught my eye was that it said women are everywhere in advertisements. They are selling things from perfume to beer. During our discussion yesterday I thought this was interesting because we talked about what types of ads were directed at what gender. We said that the male dominated magazines had cars and beer in them, and the women magazines had clothes and perfume. We didn't talk so much about which gender was being used in each type of ad. This article made a point in that women are in both ads; in every car, beer, or pizza ad. It doesn't matter what type of ad it is, a woman is going to be in it.

Another big thing women deal with in the media is weight loss. It's in books, on television, on the radio, and in magazines, everywhere you look something is telling you how you can lose weight. This puts a lot of pressure on women and can possibly lead to insecurities and eating disorders.

The last thing I would like to point out is the use of color in the media. Although they said that women of other race's were being used more, white women still heavily dominated the advertisements. This shows that advertisers believe using white women will sell a product better. If they are using a woman of different race, it is because they believe that certain type of product needs a certain race of woman in order for it to sell. It's like they are selling the woman more then they are actually selling the product.

Race & Women

After reading Report from the Bahamas I realized that women's studies is about much more than just gender. There are a lot of different factors that relate to these studies such as race, politics, and economic standing. One that is talked about the most in June Jordan's article is race. It was kind of confusing at first because I didn't get why they were talking about these things. The topics seemed very vague and not straightforward at all. As I kept reading I figured out that by traveling to different parts of the world you are engaged in different ways of living. In the Bahamas what was being done to Sokutu may have been normal and not frowned upon. The relationship between how women there weren't going eat if they didn't sell anything, and he was going to go broke if he bought too much was an interesting thought. All June had to worry about was not spending too much money, while the women were worrying about making money in order to survive. The economic factor plays a huge role in this article about how women are making a living. Race and gender being unpredictable is also talked about a lot in this reading, and it makes sense that it is because you'll never know what your getting yourself into until you go to some other place and walk in someone else's shoes. They weren't extremely specific about if white or black women had a better and or easier life, but what they did talk about was the struggles each has to overcome. The woman that was being beaten by her alcoholic husband is a sad, but very common story. A lot of women, race aside, have terrible living situations and are trapped without any help. This leads to the idea that the men have the power in relationships and can control the women. What needs to be changed is that women do have authority and can make there own choices; everyone should be able to stand up for himself or herself. On page 120 it says, "how would Olive rate me?" Now I don't know if June is male or female, but a question like that could be interpreted different ways. Would they be rated on how clean they were, what kind of things were left around the room, or many other factors that someone could judge someone on. A stereotype being that a woman would leave the room more clean then a man, and would pick up after herself. Those are the types of things you see being a maid or housekeeper, you see private things about peoples lives that makes you judge them by gender. After I went over this article again it started to make more sense to me, but I still believe more specific facts and thoughts were said in it.  I look forward to reading more articles and seeing things in the media that relate to race and women's studies. It's interesting to see how different cultures treat women, and what they are thought of as. 

Homophobia

After reading Suzanne Pharr's Homophobia reading I had two issues with what was said. 1. "In current backlash usage, feminist equals man-hater, which equals lesbian." This problem I have with this statement is that just because a woman likes the same sex, doesn't mean they hate the other one. Also it assumes that someone that dislikes men for any reason is a lesbian; which isn't true either. 2. "The word lesbian is still fully charged and carries with it the full threat of loss of power and privilege." There are so many powerful women in the world today that overpower men in the workforce and every day lives. If you’re a lesbian you choose how you want to act, you can either lead or follow, it's your choice. The loss of power is in the hands of the woman, and they can decide what they're going to do with it. Overall I thought this reading was very interesting, and made room for a lot of thoughts and discussion.