We are both socialized and trained to have anxiety over masculinity, femininity, and about our body as a gendered construction. It has become an obsessive concentration in an increasingly visual culture, a perpetual quest to meet expectations of self and standards of society. The world in which we live writes a disastrous and oppressive fiction of “woman” which involves an incessant devaluation and dismissal. Femininity is synonymous with weakness and never-endingly associated with things such as beauty and body. In this environment, insecurities become strategies and this stress is turned into a source of profit. People’s identities are converted into products as human worth is deposited onto the pages of magazines and into the shelves of
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The characters they play are rarely multi-faceted, designed to have little personality in order not to distract from their physical appearance. Lookism pervades cinematic content in very meaningful ways, and female characters, even in family movies, serve primarily as either fulfilling a traditional stereotypical role, or that of eye candy. Even in movies where the main characters are female or when there is a heroine rather than a hero such is the case in the Alien series and the film Thelma and Louise, the endings are not happy. Instead, the women are driven off the edge into some sort of oblivion, meeting their death as the conclusion is that there is no place for a female of empowerment to exist in this world. According to statistics from the New York Film Academy, only 30.8% of the speaking characters in the top 500 films of the years 2007-2012 are women. Even films of the category known as “chick flicks”, which are targeted towards a female audience, often have depictions of women that closely reflect the dominant patriarchal ideology. There is strong misogyny in the film industry that marginalizes and objectifies women on screen, and they are put into degrading roles which do not offer the complexity of a real …show more content…
Art has a long history of images that cater to the male gaze, as art was typically marked as solely a male endeavor. Although the institutional power structures that led to the designation of art as a male field have begun to shift, the problem is still very much alive today. The Guerilla Girls have pointed out that a vast majority of artists whose work appears in major museums are male, and most of the works that depict nude humans have females as their subject, or essentially, their object. Typical representations of the female nude were crafted by male artists who put women on display for the pleasure of a presumed male spectator. It can truly be said that the “recurrent images of sexualized female bodies actively masculinize the museum as a social environment”. The bodies of women are continuously put on display, but their creations rarely are. Female art is considered to be of lesser value than that done by males, and its presence in museums in sporadic at best. Part of the problem is that the curators of museums are simply unwilling, or not daring enough, to reconfigure the hegemonic narrative currently being told in a way that would introduce the new perspective of female
The characters they play are rarely multi-faceted, designed to have little personality in order not to distract from their physical appearance. Lookism pervades cinematic content in very meaningful ways, and female characters, even in family movies, serve primarily as either fulfilling a traditional stereotypical role, or that of eye candy. Even in movies where the main characters are female or when there is a heroine rather than a hero such is the case in the Alien series and the film Thelma and Louise, the endings are not happy. Instead, the women are driven off the edge into some sort of oblivion, meeting their death as the conclusion is that there is no place for a female of empowerment to exist in this world. According to statistics from the New York Film Academy, only 30.8% of the speaking characters in the top 500 films of the years 2007-2012 are women. Even films of the category known as “chick flicks”, which are targeted towards a female audience, often have depictions of women that closely reflect the dominant patriarchal ideology. There is strong misogyny in the film industry that marginalizes and objectifies women on screen, and they are put into degrading roles which do not offer the complexity of a real …show more content…
Art has a long history of images that cater to the male gaze, as art was typically marked as solely a male endeavor. Although the institutional power structures that led to the designation of art as a male field have begun to shift, the problem is still very much alive today. The Guerilla Girls have pointed out that a vast majority of artists whose work appears in major museums are male, and most of the works that depict nude humans have females as their subject, or essentially, their object. Typical representations of the female nude were crafted by male artists who put women on display for the pleasure of a presumed male spectator. It can truly be said that the “recurrent images of sexualized female bodies actively masculinize the museum as a social environment”. The bodies of women are continuously put on display, but their creations rarely are. Female art is considered to be of lesser value than that done by males, and its presence in museums in sporadic at best. Part of the problem is that the curators of museums are simply unwilling, or not daring enough, to reconfigure the hegemonic narrative currently being told in a way that would introduce the new perspective of female