Evolution of Fatherhood Final

By: Maxine Macias

To explore fatherhood, we must first look at patriarchy. Patriarchy doesn’t negatively affect men or women alone, but society as a whole. Institutions, religious, and family systems operate mainly on patriarchy.

 

This was evident in the 1950’s portrayal of family structures. You have the father, who obviously is the head of household and the working man and his supportive housewife who stayed home and performed her domestic duties. She was submissive, and didn’t tend to have much presence besides serving her husband.

 

This was an early example of the gender roles created by patriarchy.

 

Gender roles are harmful to society because of their way of imprisoning people psychologically, making people feel the need to fill a certain role in order to conform to society’s expectations.

 

Gender roles were given to everyone the minute they entered the face of the earth.

The silly notion that girls must wear pink or boys must wear blue are gender roles being assigned.

 

And parents and schools are constant reminders of one should behave based on gender.

 

Girls are taught to talk about their feelings and while boys are taught to be tough and strong. While boys are taught to repress their feelings, but violence however tends to be acceptable.

 

The ironic thing about fatherhood and patriarchy is it’s similarity in the relationship between a child and parent. According to psychotherapist, John Bradshaw, “blind obedience- is the foundation upon which patriarchy stands; the repression of all emotions except fear; the destruction of individual will power; and the repression of thinking whenever it departs from the authority figure’s way of thinking.”

In the 1950’s onto the 1960’s the father was portrayed idealistically, as all-knowing, almost godlike, providing wisdom and instilling discipline in their children.

 

However, in the 60’s and 70’s, the American Feminist Movement raged on demanding an end to gender discrimination in the workplace. The quest for women’s liberation did not stop in the workplace but also in women’s personal lives. They wanted to overthrow the patriarchy that oppressed many aspects of their lives. They believed that “personal was politics.”

 

This change in gender roles began to show itself in television shows in the 80’s as men were becoming more involved in the household and women were portrayed as having more of a stronger personality and working outside of the household. The new trend of clueless, imperfect yet lovable fathers emerged.

 

Fathers were shown as being more submissive to their wives or taking on what would stereotypically have been a mother’s responsibilities.

 

In addition to the changing of gender roles, racial diversity was becoming more prominent. While most popular shows featured Caucasian families, slowly, African American characters and families were being shown starting in the late 70’s. It wasn’t until the late 80’s and early 90’s that black families became common in mainstream television.

 

It wasn’t until late 90’s or early 2000’s that other minority and interracial families were being represented in mainstream television.

Sources

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2014/01/tv_guides_50_greatest_tv_dads.php

Finding Voice and Identity

Media has come to portray only a certain demographic. While, television shows and films will often “try” to diversify their cast, white actors/ actresses tend to dominate the entertainment industry. Even when there is some sort of diversity, the character is usually perceived as having stereotypical behavior and appearance or being absolutely whitewashed to the point where they’ve lost identity. The issue with media is the people at the top who control the industry. They tend to be white males. It’s not even a matter of race, either it’s also an issue of gender.

Women, no matter what race, tend to be objectified and submissive to men in television or films. Even if a woman gains a strong role, such as a superhero, the producers would still manage to sexualize her clothing. It’s like building someone up to knock them down. Not only that but notice a pattern in superhero movies. Even if there are strong women leads, they always have to share the spotlight with a man or are a smaller part of the group. Take The Dark Knight Rises for example, you have Anne Hathaway as a smart ally of Batman but here she is in a tight bodysuit. While perhaps the idea behind this whole smart and sexy image of women is to redefine women’s status, but it only continues to objectify them. In The Avengers, Scarlet Johansson can also be seen in a tight bodysuit. Women may not half naked anymore, but men still insist on finding a way to ogle women’s assets.

 

While portrayals of women are not quite entirely realistic and tend to be overly sexualized, the viewer doesn’t realize the negative effects of being constantly exposed to this type of image. The women are objects with no voice and are not seen for intelligence or personality but for their looks. But the portrayal of women is not the only issue in the entertainment industry, women filmmakers and directors also face a roadblock when it comes to having the public see their work. In Saalfield’s art and activism, women filmmakers and their work are often left in the shadows of men. The issue with media ownership is that it is male dominated and these women attempt to have their work honored with no avail. They tend to be shown in independent film theaters and festivals, however, women filmmakers need to make a breakthrough to mainstream media because mainstream media what most audiences will see. Independent films tend to have a certain crowd, and women’s work shouldn’t be limited to a few people. Mainstream media  tends to portray reality while also defining it, and without women’s work being honored, everyone as an audience is blinded by one viewpoint that keeps society from progressing and embracing each other’s differences.

Internews, a non-profit organization has a mission to empower local media worldwide and give voices to those that need to be heard. In a special project call “From Counting Women to Making Women Count,” they focus on how they could make women more vocal because of their importance in moving societies forward. They hope to more integrate women into media.

“Because gender mainstreaming recognizes that discrimination is a political act, and because women are often in socially circumscribed and subordinate roles, ‘it is necessary to address men’s gender roles and identities to make an impact on women’s subordination.'”

In Pakistan, sexual harassment is the one of the largest forms of violence women and girls alike must face on a daily basis. In 2008, elected women and civil representatives said that 70% of women experience sexual harassment in some aspect of their lives. And while women are beginning to gain access to more technology and the ability to voice themselves online. With that power comes the increasing issue of violence towards women, digitally, with acts including cyberstalking, bullying, and other abuse.

Internews has joined with Bytes For All (B4A), a Pakistan based human rights organization. They have a campaign called “Take Back The Tech” in which they protect human and digital rights. They do their best in securing the digital security of human rights defender and media professionals so that they can use media as a tool to end gender-based violence as well as bring their cause to not only local, but the international community.

Going back to my previous point, we need to have more variety of voices in media because it’s not only pop culture we should be afraid of influencing through media but civilizations. Women make up more than half the population, and the media needs to begin to show that as so. In a world ran by men, women need to get up and fight for not only equality but for their identities. That they’re not just objects, that they have thoughts, thoughts that need to be shared with the world. Because when their thoughts are often trapped so are their hopes for progress.

 

Bibliography

1) “About Us.” Bytes for All, Pakistan. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014. <http://content.bytesforall.pk/about&gt;.

2) “From Counting Women to Making Women Count: Women-Focused Media Development | Howard Media Group.” From Counting Women to Making Women Count: Women-Focused Media Development | Howard Media Group. Internews, Mar. 2013. Web. 16 Apr. 2014. <http://www.howardmediagroup.org/policy-action/counting-women-making-women-count-women-focused-media-development&gt;.

3) Redding, Judith M., Victoria A. Brownworth, and Catherine Saalfield. “Art and Activism.” Film Fatales: Independent Women Directors. Seattle: Seal, 1997. N. pag. Print.

The Evolution of Fatherhood

By: Maxine Macias

  

For my final project, I’d like to explore the evolution of fatherhood portrayed in television. I’d specifically like to compare the idealistic father to a more realistic portrayal of fatherhood. I think that before we just focus on men and their roles as parents we must first evaluate the women’s roles first. Television tends to attempt to portray real life. As we evolve as a society so does television.

Because women’s roles in society have changed, it created an impact on men’s roles. Women were originally seen to just be  housewives. Eventually they were encouraged to join the workforce during World War II but after the men came back home from war, women resumed their maternal roles in society. Eventually starting the 60’s and 70’s, American idealism was plummeting because of the Vietnam War and the Watergate Scandal, and down with it came fatherhood ideals. Into the 80’s and 90’s father figures were becoming more idiotic. Women and mothers specifically in television were having more stronger personalities. Fathers were beginning to become more realistic in the way that they weren’t perceived to be these perfect individuals but men who were still learning as they go through parenting.

I’d like to research television shows from the 50’s to present day television and really just breakdown how much progress television has made based on gender roles and fatherhood. With this research, I want to create a video montage of the varying father figures in history to present and touch upon their differences in approaches to fatherhood and also perhaps compare the changing roles of women as well.

 

Sources Cited

1. Butler, Judith. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

2. Casserly, Meghan. “In Photos: Modern TV Dads.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 15 June 2010. Web. 24 Mar. 2014. <http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/15/tv-dads-parenthood-modern-family-forbes-woman-time-gossip-girl_slide_2.html&gt;.

3. Goudreau, Jenna. “The Changing Roles Of TV Dads.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 15 June 2010. Web. 24 Mar. 2014. <http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/15/tv-dads-parenthood-modern-family-forbes-woman-time-dean-mcdermott.html&gt;.

4. Goudreau, Jenna. “TV Dads: From Father Knows Best To Father Knows Nothing.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 15 June 2010. Web. 24 Mar. 2014. <http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/15/tv-dads-family-father-knows-best-forbes-woman-time-television_slide.html&gt;.

5. Hooks, Bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Washington Square, 2004. 107+. Print.

Loss of Identity

The purpose of these images is to sell products by targeting women while trying to appeal to a patriarchal society. Most ads concerning fashion seem to have an alarming way of objectifying women. Many of them of course have the superficially thin model but many have alluded to sexual assault undertones. The ad would feature a single woman surrounded by a flock of men and not in an endearing way either. Most of them obviously are sexualizing the women but also suggest some sort of gang rape activity being done by the men. As if attacking women’s insecurities wasn’t enough.

While we see these images everyday and may have become desensitized to them, that doesn’t mean that they don’t affect our subconscious thoughts. These ads that glamorize violence acts towards women eventually give society the notion that it’s okay to gang up on women, that sexual abuse is okay. Fashion is very powerful, it’s the way people try to express themselves. Trends and fads are controlled by the designers that put out those ads.

These images stand between portraying popular culture but also popular culture takes from these images. It goes hand in hand, really. According to Jean Kilbourne’s Cutting Girls Down to Size, “The culture both reflected and reinforced by advertising, urges girls to adopt a false self, to bury alive their real selves, to become “feminine,” which means to be nice and kind and sweet, to compete with other girls for the attention of boys, and to value romantic relationships with boys above all else.” The values of advertisers back in the 1950’s to present times has not really changed. Women are subjected to a certain role and standard. Media still thinks that woman’s sole purpose is motherhood, that she should cherish her relationships with men for the sole purpose of procreation.

Ann Oakley a writer for Housewife touches upon the role of the traditional women’s magazine in Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. She states, “In psychological terms, they enabled the harassed mother, the overburdened housewife, to make contact with her ideal self: the self which aspires to be a good wife, a good mother, and an efficient homemaker… Women’s expected role in society [was] to strive after perfection in all three roles.”

This implies that a woman’s identity can’t stand alone, that she is defined by someone else. She is an object. However, in bell hook’s The Will To Change, she says “…feminist advocates collude in the pain of men wounded by patriarchy when they falsely represent men as always and only powerful, as always and only gaining privileges from their blind obedience to patriarchy.”

While women are often victims of patriarchy, people have to not only focus on them but men as well. Men are given this expectation of having power that maybe not all of them want or can fulfill.

Another issue that seems to be defined by someone else in advertisements are racial stereotypes portrayed in the media. These stereotypes are created and portrayed by white advertisers who cannot relate to these people at all. Since consumers tend to absorb media and consider it normalcy, advertisers are creating identities that aren’t correct and changing people’s perceptions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLgaFUOrdLM

For example, in this Nivea ad, a groomed black man is shown holding another black man’s head that is unshaven. “Re-Civilize Yourself” is splashed across the ad. First off, the fact that he’s holding just the head of another black man is already controversial enough, representative of black-on-black violence. It represents the hierarchies within a race. But also, the fact that the ad suggests that a black man isn’t civilized is ridiculous. This ad thrives on a stereotype and blatantly tries to pit that against the consumer.

In hook’s The Oppositional Gaze, she states, “…one’s enjoyment of a film wherein representations of blackness were stereotypically degrading and de-humanizing co-existed with a critical practice that restored presence where it was negated.” Basically, the media’s way of adding diversity to white dominated media was representing black people in a stereotypical way. While some would find it amusing, by finding it amusing, one contributes to media being able to continuously associate a race with a certain stereotype. 

In this PlayStation Portable ad by Sony, they blatantly defy the two races stereotypically. Not only are they of corresponding colors, but also the white woman is represented as white supremacy. She is holding onto the black woman’s face and this notion of power she hold over her is obvious. It pretty much refers to back to slavery, when the slaveowners would punish slaves just for looking at them. It shows how powerful the gaze is and how it relates to power structures. The white woman stands tall over the small black woman as if showing the white woman to be like a parent and the black woman, a child. hooks talks about how as a child she would be punished for gazing but would be forced to look at her parent, similar to this photo where the black woman is forced to look at her oppressor.

I think a good example of an alternative to the mainstream is this lego advertisement featuring a girl instead of a boy. Lego’s are creative building blocks for young children usually aimed at boys. However, it’s good that they’re showing girls playing with things that will develop their thinking skills as opposed to just playing with dolls. It also challenges femininity and beauty standards with the phrase, “What it is is beautiful.” It implies that girls can be intelligent and beautiful and don’t always have to conform to society’s expectations of perfection. Note, the girl is not dressed in a typical skirt or dress as little girls are usually perceived, she’s dressed in regular play clothes. It’s a more realistic way of perceiving girls and allowing them to choose their own identity.

Works Cited

1. Hooks, Bell. “Chapter 7: The Oppositional Gaze, Black Female Spectators.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End, 1992. N. pag. Print.

2. Hooks, Bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria, 2004. Print.

3. Kilbourne, Jean. Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising. New York, NY: Free, 1999. Print.

4. Minato, Charlie. “10 Recent Racist Ads That Companies Wish You Would Forget.”Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc, 07 June 2012. Web. 12 Mar. 2014. <http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-most-racist-ads-of-the-modern-era-2012-6?op=1&gt;.

5. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. London: Chatto & Windus, 1990. Print.

There’s more than meets the eye

By: Maxine Macias

Power is the ability or right to control people or things. According to Practices of Looking, images can cause us to conjure up certain emotions. Also, we have a sense of power over images in the way we choose to perceive them. Like the old saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” We are constantly looking at images, and subconsciously it affects the way we view the world. While we may not immediately process any subliminal messages, it eventually impacts our expectations of the real world.

Hegemony is similar to power and is the influence or control of a group of people. While power has the right, hegemony is more of a subtle way of manipulating people. What government is to power, media is to hegemony. While media tries to portray real life, it also in turns influences culture and people’s views. Pop culture especially seems to capture most people nowadays rather than actual important news because of spectacle. We have become obsessed with the glamour that celebrities depict because it’s impressive and out of the ordinary. Entertainment and pleasure have become not only our preferences but also our priorities somehow. People focus on trying to become something their not because of this envy of glamour. Money, power, sex is depicted constantly in the media, especially hip-hop and rap culture. One is conceived as being successful if they have all three. It influences not only people’s viewpoints but their buying behaviors as well. Often celebrity endorsements cause certain markets to buy that product based solely because of the person who was promoting it.

Speaking of celebrities, brings us to the topic of sexism and the consumer. Sexism is attitudes or behaviors that create stereotypes of social roles based on sex and a consumer is a person who buys goods. It’s important to look at these two as things that go hand in hand in media. Since about the 40’s or 50’s have been creating these social roles that are expected of each sex. Women in the 50’s were expected to be the perfect housewife, and were often a target for advertisements. Ads for home products tended to have a woman, or more specifically, a housewife. Often, they would show how a product would either make life easier for the woman or something that the woman “is capable” of using.  Women were depicted as being incapable of what a man could do. The men held the power, and the women’s job was simply to comply.

 

However, as the men went off to war in World War II, ads began to try to entice women into joining the workforce in order to replace the men. Two of them were both of “Rosie the River,” who was different than the other ads portraying women. These ads portray Rosie as woman who built planes for the war. She is not in a skirt, smiling happily at home, she is dressed in a uniform that covered her body and was rather masculine suggesting that women have as much ability as men. It was powerful for women in an era that was used to seeing the same old thing. The other “Rosie the Riveter” ad was simply a woman flexing her arm with a tough facial expression that suggested women are strong and powerful.

 

While social roles are slowly beginning to shift, there are still social pressures and double standards placed on women based on appearance. A certain standard of beauty seems to be the only one media wants to show its viewers. Women are expected to be skinny or overly sexualized. These images create this unrealistic unattainable beauty in order to create more desire of products for women. What many don’t realize however is that it’s all false. The models seen are covered in makeup and as if that wasn’t enough, are also photoshopped.  Because a lot of companies were going under fire for overly using Photoshop, as of recently companies, such as Dove and American Eagle Outfitters are beginning to do ad campaigns based on natural beauty encouraging women to love themselves and their bodies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O600kDpBNj4

Sex is a tool that ad makers often use to market their products. Women aren’t the only victims as men are beginning to be more sexualized, as seen in a clothing ad such as Hollister’s. “Sex sells” is an old saying that still lives on. The reason why sex sells is this desire that people feel they would get from buying certain products. This idea of desire comes from the gaze. The gaze is looking or staring something with eagerness or desire. According to “Practices of Looking,” “In much psychoanalytic film criticism, the gaze is not the act of looking itself but the viewing relationship characteristic of a particular set of social circumstances.” The gaze is also a marketing technique in which the subject of an ad stares directly at the viewer as a way to entice them.

 

The gaze also refers to the way a viewer is not white empathetic of the subject. For example, in Leppard’s Doubletake, while the viewer was intrigued by the Native American people and perhaps sympathized for them she lacked empathy. She did not have a true understanding of their culture based on the photo.  The reason why the pedagogy or the art, science, or teaching of ways of looking is important is to correlate the meaning of the image to the meaning of the world around us. An image means a lot more than what it shows you in plain sight, often times the representation of an image can be deceiving or have more depth. In Practices of Looking, an argument often brought up because of representation is the source of whether images reflect the world or do individuals create their own meaning to the image.

Works Cited

1) Doubletake: The diary of a relationship with an image. Lucy R. Lippard. 
Third Text 
Vol. 5, Iss. 16-17, 1991.

2) History.com Staff. “Rosie the Riveter.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 16 Feb. 2014. <http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/rosie-the-riveter&gt;.

3) Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 16 Feb. 2014. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/&gt;.

4) Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Print.

Hey, I’m Maxine.

I’m currently a junior and I’m double majoring in journalism and video production.

Ironically, I don’t really wanna be a journalist. I’m more interested in hopefully one day producing a film or show or maybe be on radio.

Oddly enough, I never really imagined myself majoring in anything I am today. I’ve always loved art and was actually in a visual arts program in high school but then switched over to a business curriculum. I was headed for business school at Baruch College in NYC but money issues came up and I ended up switching out to a local university that I hated and then transferred here.

I originally was gonna go for marketing because I wanted to do Public Relations but decided I didn’t really need to go through the horrors of business school to do such. Also, my interests have changed as I’ve taken classes here. I also figured I could still express my creativity through writing screenplays or creating films.

That’s about it… for now.