Essay about The male gaze

Submitted By elisabertoni
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Pages: 5
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Not everything is black or white in life, and especially in this country, and our culture society. There are many shades of grade when we talk about the way things, gender, and sexuality are portraying in the media and even in our today’s world. I want to demonstrated by analyzing Robin Thicke “Blurred Lines” video and it parodies; and Gentlemen Prefers Blonde, the existences of misrepresentation in terms of gender, power, and the struggles that woman face in the media.
There is that misconception that everything has to bee look at in one to one direction, and that there is one correct way to interpreted the information. In Douglas Kellner’s essay “Culture Studies, Multiculturalism and Media Culture”, Kellner says that “Radio, television, films, and other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of “us” and “them’”. Social media is one of the biggest places where misconception, and demonstration of who holds the power comes to place. Society needs to realize that there is a bigger picture, that they have been manipulated into think that certain behaviors are acceptable and that others are not. But who are the ones in charge of creating the rules? In James Lull essay, he explains the concept of Hegemony, which is “The power or dominance that one social group holds over others”. Unfortunately in today’s society we know that there is not such a thing as equality between gender, that basically everything is rule by men, and not all men, but white educated wealthy men, which ends up being a small portion of our society. We can see how the idea of “the male gaze” comes into place when people are analyzing the media. In terms of spectatorship not only the ruling class is looking at the media with the idea of men dominating our society, but also women and the rest of society are manipulating into think that all the media production are created with one end, which is the idea of white men being the ultimate power rulers while women just being use as objects for men to look at. Ultimately women end up using these misrepresentations as their model of behavior. When we look at the Robin Thicken video of “Blurred Lines”, we all have almost the same understanding of the video. Men fully dress representing the power over the women who are almost naked, powerless and are objectifies. It is obvious in the music video that this is a denigrating interpretation of women. Women are being dehumanized, showing them naked with zero power nor privilege, while the men of this video have all the authority, and they are shown to be the ones and only in charge of the situation. This video is as sexist as it could be. But even though we know this video is considered to be denigrating, as spectators of media, society ends up believing that it is acceptable to treat women this way because the media creates a distortion of reality. On the other hand, if we look at the parody of the video, we can see how the same video looks wrong or abnormal to society including women themselves, in this case we are looking the video from the feminist spectatorship. When we watched the “blurred lines” “Defined Lines” Feminist Parody, the video does not offer the same effect of desire as the original video does, simply because in this video the ones who are target as the sexual object are the men, while women are fully dress and are the ones who represent power. Even though the parody is supposed to show women’s power, it does not seem believable by any means. Viewers are never going to considered men to be as equal as women, even if they are shown at the same level. In the case of Gentlemen Prefers Blonde, There is this idea about the way women are portray, in this case, Lorelei and Dorothy, who are the
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