It all comes together...

I've gone through about a million ideas when trying to decide what I'm going to do for my final project. I don't think that it actually be that hard to come up with a topic, there's literally just so many interesting options! I think I've finally decided though. I'm going to do: Sexual Ads in Teen Magazines. I'm going to look at as many current teen mags as possible, including Cosmo!Girl, Teen, Seventeen, ... and look at their ads. I'm also going to look at older oriented magazines and see if there's a contrast between the amount of sexual ads. I'm going to come up with a set of guidelines to help decipher what is sexual and what is not, and go from there. :)

Project Stuff...

This final project is coming up quickly:

I've started thinking more along the lines of print ads. I would love to do face-ism or random girls in music videos, but I think constructing the guidelines for a moving medium would be really tricky.

I could either do ads or content.

I found this really cool book at Barnes and Noble that I'm going to try to use in my study! Here are some quotes from it (Prude by Carol Platt Liebau):

Page 8 - From all of this, one message emerges: Sex is everywhere: Everyone ‘s doing it, and that’s just the way it is. This message is disseminated to young girls through almost every element of their lives. One journalist who shadowed at twelve-year-old girl estimated that she had been exposed to about 280 sexy images in the course of a day.

In short, today’s girl world has become saturated with sex. Even girls standing only at the threshold of adolescence are forced to absorb information, confront issues, and handle situations that, in past generations, would have presented themselves much later in their lives, if at all.

Pg 76 Magazines too often today present sexual activity as the preferred pastime of sophisticated, alluring and glamorous protagonists.

Pg 78 In fact, judging by many of the books and magazines aimed at teen girls, sexual restraint is almost the only behavior that’s portrayed as aberrant. Doing what’s right becomes a conviently elastic concepts, best understood as doing what’s “right for you.”

Pg 108 Loveline’s Dr. Drew Pinksy has observed, “It’s mortifying that it’s so hard to find a female rolemodel… in the culture, there’s just not much that you want your young female to hang on to.”

Pg 142 Taken as a whole, the influence of such ads is substantial. In fact, 30 percent of teens ages thirteen through eighteen have bought clothes because of seeing a magazine ad about them.

Pg 145 these ad campaigns – and others like them, some going so far as to flirt with bestiality – represent what critics have called “the increasing coarseness of commercial discourse,” and their effects on American culture as a whole are unfortunate. Over time, confronted with ever-more-outrageous sexual images, consumers’ collective tastes become degraded and their sensibilities are dulled, as a part of a marketing race to the bottom. Eventually, smutty advertising loses its shock value – the over the top sexiness celebrated in the ads begins to seem normal. And our common culture is vulgarized as a result.

Pg 145 The effects of sexy advertising are profound. Retailers’ efforts to create a market among young people for even mature products have resulted in age compression, in which tweens and younger teens are encouraged to want products once exclusively reserved for adults. These ads designed to drive demand for these products (and public acceptance of them) teach inexperienced teen (and younger) boys and girls that exaggerated, sexualized attitudes, fashions, and behaviors are a standard part of mainstream culture. Over time, teens and their younger siblings receive the message that it’s expected – even desirable – for them to present themselves as flagrantly sexual beings, long before their old enough to handle (or even understand) the accompanying responsibilities.

Bamboozled

Last week in class we watched Bamboozled.

It was a really disturbing movie - and although it was meant to be a satire, which it was, it was also deeply disturbing. I felt weird watching it.

Also, scratch the movie poster idea. Looking through movie posters online felt kind of pointless... I'm not sure if anyone cares about the dynamics of a movie poster. It would be cool to see if there are any trends... but that probably all goes back to the genre, and I'm not an avid enough movie watcher to delve that deep into it.

African American Women Special on NBC Nightly News

Just reading over those few paragraphs on Brian Williams' NBC Nightly special "African American Women: Where They Stand". I hope that I'm able to catch some of this five part series.

I'm especially interested in the portion of the show that deals with politics. And will race trump gender? Or will gender trump race? That's a neat (and kind of sad) question to ask. But, both front-runners representing the Democratic party are, well - NOT old white men. Hilary Clinton is obviously a woman, and Barak Obama is half black. I think race and gender will play a huge role in the 2008 election. People will, unfortunately, be drawn to the polling places to prevent either of those two people from getting into office. On the other hand, imagine how many people will feel well-represented when someone like themselves has the possibility of running the country. I'm sure that if Hilary gets on the ballot, more women will head to the polls and if Barak gets on the ballot - more blacks will go to the polls. It feels better to stand behind someone who has battled and faced the same things you have.

Should be interesting to see unfold.

Whew...

I am going to use the Fisk method to depict official movie posters (the poster that movies use to promote themselves on billboards, and on the front of movie theaters).

Stereotyping Asians

I have never really thought about the extent to which Asians are stereotyped before. After I read this article, I thought about all the other things I've learned this semester and I've come to a conclusion - dannnng, we are a nation of stereotypers! There are expected actions and view points, and certain way we perceive people - even if we don't realize it. I have never actually thought about the things this article pointed out, and I think that, in and of itself, is crazy!

- Asian women = Lotus Blossom in advertising - delicate, submissive, pure
- Asian men = Never seen as love interests in movies, are only known for their martial arts fights scenes.
- Asians in general = are perceived to be smarter and bring in more income than they actually do.

And I never really even realized that this happened. Why?

Enough is Enough

I really enjoyed reading about Enough is Enough. I love that they are taking matters into their own hands and being pro-active in standing up for themselves, and other minorities, who are negatively stereotyped by the media. I checked out Enough is Enough's official website, and that was pretty cool too. I'm in a Political Science class this semester about interest groups, and Enough is Enough has several factors that would qualify it as an interest group. The only way that interest groups are different from political parties, is that IGs don't form around a central goal of getting one of their own members into office. IGs are created because of some shift in the norm, it's called the ripple effect. Enough is Enough does not agree with how blacks or minorities are portrayed in the media, and want a social change in what is accepted. The ripple effect says that another interest group will form, in response to Enough is Enough, to counteract what EiE stands for. The formation of IGs goes on forever and ever like that. An interest group's members all have a common interest or goal, and mobilize to address it, which Enough is Enough has done. Educating the public through media attention is also a great thing for a group, but getting that attention through demonstrations - which could get out of hand - , doesn't always present a group in a positive light.

Just some stuff I was thinking about and stringing together from two different classes.