Race, Gender and Media Class Reflection 4

 This week, my undergraduate project number 1 was due in the form of an essay analyzing a historical artifact and the way it depicts people.

For my essay, I chose the Marlboro Man ad campaign, and had a fun time analyzing it. I had previously discussed the Marlboro Man in a class during my freshman year, and was able to fully analyze how it played on societies views of masculinity at the time it aired.

A fun fact I found was that Marlboro cigarettes were originally aimed at women because filtered cigarettes were viewed as feminine. For the project, I was also able to interview my parents about what they thought of the ad at the time, for which they said they didn't think too much bout it when it was popular, but now they can notice how modern advertisements incorporate more diverse elements.

Coincidentally enough, the topic of the class for this week was masculinity and how it plays a role in our society. In my essay, I incorporated a chapter from Lind's book, Honing Hegemonic Masculinity, which we also looked over in class. In reading that chapter and researching it along with my essay, I was really struck by how strong the traditional views of men are in society (e.g. the leader of the house, breadwinner, no emotions) and while most men want to be in positions like that to feel value, society pushes those roles onto all men even when some don't want it.

As a man myself, I've been lead my whole life to fulfill these roles, get married and have a family. While that is something in life that I want to accomplish, I can also admit that it those are not goals everybody has in mind. Luckily in modern society, people are becoming more open to how others feel and are moving away from traditional norms.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Race, Gender and Media Class Reflection Part 6

Our topic for class this week was violence against women in music videos and images of women in the media. The main goal was to decipher how women are portrayed in media and the stereotypes that they are portrayed to have. I particularly liked this week because we were able to break down two songs that I am familiar with in Eminem's "Love the Way you lie" featuring Rihanna as well as how Nicki Minaj portrays herself in her music. As mentioned in Lind's book, music like Eminem's song only empowers the feelings about women that society can have: that men and women are equally responsible for perpetuating violence in relationships, that women asked to be abused, and violence is a means to ignite sexual arousal. In that section, Lind goes on to say that "although females can be violent toward male partners, the opposite (men attacking women) is the norm. Representations negating this reality rigorously reduce perceptions of male accountability." While this i...
Read more

Race, Gender and Media Class Reflection Part 5

This week, our class took our midterm exam, which required us to write 10 short essay questions over various topics that we've been looking over throughout the semester. As I was taking the exam, I was refreshed on some of the content that we had to write about, and was reminded of how interesting they could be. One question asked us to use examples from the film "The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords" and analyze what they did for the Black community at time when prejudice was high. I went and skimmed a transcript of the documentary and found the bit of information that said how the Black Press propped up its community, which was essentially through humanizing them. All of this to say, I felt inspired being reminded of what a community who is facing hardships can do for each other in order to keep spirits high. Another question I enjoyed answering was on how corporate ownership of news organizations affects media output. One thing that I haven't looked over much i...
Read more

Race, Gender and Media Class Reflection Part 3

This week, our class went over the Black community in the press and how they have been traditionally discriminated against. A discussion item for the week was the Key and Peele skit "Is This Country Song Racist," and really started to get my mind going on how modern day social media and skits like this have turned casual racism into more comedic. In the skit, Keegan-Michael Key shows Peele some country songs he has been writing which turn out to have massive racist innuendos. Peele gets up and leave, but the skit is of course made for the intended purpose of making the audience laugh. After watching the video, I began to think about everything I see on social media, especially Instagram Reels, about stereotypes, not just of Black people but all races. Black people eating fried chicken, Asian people not being able to drive, Indians smelling, etc. A lot of these stereotypes are put into memes for likes and views on social media platforms as a form of comedy. While at face value...
Read more