Surviving Feminist Of The Technical Mannequin

In my media exam last week, one of the questions was about the representation of gender in the media, and in particular, females. We’ve done SO MUCH stuff about gender representation in media, women’s protests in history and women’s social inequality in sociology. So this whole exam was a massive rant about how women are represented in the media as ‘sex objects’ and ‘passive characters,’ and how perverted young men oogle at images of semi-naked women on the front of Nuts magazine etc, and how the economic divide between men and women is reinforced in the media but their character status.

Blah blah blah.

But reading through the essay I realised how much of a feminist I am. In terms of genders I have some really strong opinions. I mean, at house parties I’ve come to find that it’s always the girls who get drunk first, and therefore taken advantage of. The guys seem a lot more open about their sexuality and apparent promiscuity. It’s the girls who are more likely (according to some research in Socio.) to judge their male friends/boyfriends by their personality, whereas boys are more likely to judge by appearance. We found some research in socio that says that in a survey, 28% of guys would date someone they saw as ‘ugly but friendly’, compared to 47% of girls.

The question in the exam was something like ‘Explain, using your own detailed examples, the representation of females in the media today.’ My essay was a massive opinionated piece about objectification and the ‘male gaze,’ and the glamourisation of teenage girls in American dramas.

Now at Symonds, a lot of people of both genders seem to be faced with pressure to look fashionable/ whatever, but the majority of the girls I know at Symonds see themselves as fat, ugly and/or have issues with self-confidence. One of my friends at work is having a beach party for his birthday next weekend, and I know someone who didn’t want to go because they were too self-conscious to be seen in her bikini/one-piece. It seems that image IS a bit part of the 21^st f_cking Century at the moment. I’m not going to be hypocritical and say this is BAD and WRONG. I’ve had my own experiences with this. I just miss the times when the biggest issue in the world was whether or not Busted were breaking up.

There was this documentary on channel 4 the other day about plastic surgery, I only watched about 5 mins of it because it was INCREDIBLY graphic. But there was this 17year old aspiring glamour model who didn’t know what the word ‘recession’ meant, but she seemed to understand EVERY WORD found on urbandictionary.com, and every single abbreviated text language thing ever created. Same applies to ‘Ladette to Lady’ which we watched in media. Annoying naïve tards.

HMNIJJTQATYCFO.

Don’t know what that means?

Neither do I :S

I made it up ^_^

Anyways I found this shocking. I know that thousands of teenagers are becoming anorexic/bulimic because they want to be Kate Moss, and I’ve always had insecurities due to the way that my own mum would guilt-trip me whenever I would have a nutella sandwich, while my brother who happens to be the sportiest person in the world can eat a BILLION nutella sarnies (if he liked them!) and still be a stick. I won’t go into that, or I’ll start another 500 word rant.

Society sucks sometimes.

P.S for the title of this blog I gave up being imaginative and instead used 'bandname generator' and typed in feminist as the keyword. and THATS what it came up with....i want to find a band called that now.. :S