Follow up: Responding to Caroline's Post

“…mass media are simply mirrors, reflecting reality...” (Douglas 18)

  

This is a vital quote to understanding the answer to a commonly asked question: what comes first, the chicken or the egg? In this case, is the media creating and selling images to society or is the media simply reselling back images society portrays? Douglas answers this question very well. Through the analogy of a fun house mirror, Douglas states that the media is indeed reselling back images society portrays, but on a much exaggerated scale.      

 

Unlike the traditional idea that women should use their intelligence and abilities to obtain power, the emergence of enlightened sexism has allowed women to use their appearances and sexuality as the means to gain power. This idea seems extremely contradictory to Rich’s notion of women being seen as human rather than sex objects. Enlightened sexism permits women to confidently and proudly embrace themselves. I feel as if embracing this concept, women view it as having the power to devalue something that society view as negative, in this case women flaunting their appearances and sexuality, and making it into something worth celebrating about. My main question, which I can’t answer, is how effective is the action of embracing something society uses against you and making it yours? 

 

After reading Adrienne Rich’s “Claiming an Education” and Susan Douglas’ “Fantasies of Power,” I can’t help but to think about the time when I was a senior in my AP Composition class reading an interesting article by Deborah Tannen titled “Marked Women, Unmarked Men.” In the article, Tannen thoroughly explains all the ways women are marked in which men are not. Women are marked by their appearances, attire, and even their title. An interesting quote from the article states, “Women can't even fill out a form without telling stories about themselves. Most forms give four titles to choose from. "Mr." carries no meaning other than that the respondent is male. But a woman who checks "Mrs." or "Miss" communicates not only whether she has been married but also whether she has conservative tastes in forms of address -- and probably other conservative values as well. Checking "Ms." declines to let on about marriage (checking "Mr." declines nothing since nothing was asked), but it also marks her as either liberated or rebellious, depending on the observer's attitudes and assumptions.” 

(To read the article visit http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/tannend/nyt062093.htm)

 

It seems as if the media and even our own English language want to trap women in certain categories without any options to choose otherwise. Labeling women seems to be much easily done than labeling men; even if men are label, their words are not as bad of a connotation as those assigned for women. (Think about all the negative connotations we thought of when we tried to define 'feminist' in class the other day). Why are women view through the lens of a men? Is there a such thing a as an unmarked woman?      

"Claiming Education" and "Fantasies of Power"

As I was reading "Fantasies of Power", I couldn't help but chuckle to myself because Susan Douglass says it all just in the introduction. Her main foci of this reading is the issue of enlightened sexism, and the ways in which women seek to gain power in society today. She provides a historical background of events in the media that have shown how feminism has developed over the years. She introduces the book by mentioning the debate of whether or not the Spice Girls are a "vehicle" for feminism. She mentioned how they advocate girl power and their hit song "Wannabe" refers to how boys need to show respect to women. However these women wore skin tight clothes, conveying that image is a factor in girl power.

One of the main themes of this book is the topic of "enlightened sexism". This term refers to the impression that women have reached their goal in progress for equality and women's rights, and now it is time for them to concentrate on their image and fall into their role as sexy young women and girls. This term emphasizes that now that women have everything they want they can exert their energy on their appearance and men. Douglass argues that women are being cut short. Women still get 75 cents to a man's dollar.

Douglass highlights the importance of power in the sense that women rise up in the ranks if they are hot, attractive, make men fall for them, and women envy them. My favorite passage of this chapter in Douglas's book is "We can play sports, excel at school, go to college, aspire to-and get-jobs previously reserved for men, be working mothers and so forth. But in exchange, we must obsess about our faces, weight, breast size, clothing brands, decorating, perfectly calibrated child-rearing, about pleasing men and being envied by other women." I think that this passage reflects where us women are at today. I know that I have played sports my whole entire life, have excelled in school, but still feel the pressures to keep up my appearance in order to impress men and gain the respect of women. I am excited to continue reading Susan Douglas's work!

In Rich's "Claiming an Education", she is giving a graduation speech at an all women's college, called Douglass College. She focuses on how women need to claim their education and not receive it. She advocates that the difference between the two is that you are acting or being acted upon and women need to act. They can not act "as a container" but rather need to be the "rightful owner." She mentions how their are still a low number of women who actually are in the upper levels of faculty at higher levels of education. She is trying to make the graduating class of Douglass college understand that they need to think, talk, and act for themselves. They need to respect their own ideas and can not treat their bodies as objects, or else their "minds are in mortal danger." She argues that even today, women are still treated as sexual objects by their professors, instead of challenging their intellectual minds. Women need to demand to be taken seriously.

I think that both authors have some overlapping ideas in the sense that they both feel as if women are treated as objects rather than humans. I think that both of these readings are captivating and are a good introduction to the beginning of this course.