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Well, this is my last blog post for the semester.  I am not going to lie, I really liked posting blogs although it got to be a bit much with all the assignments from my other classes.  However, the benefits I feel far out weighed the cons. 

For my last blog I have choosen to write about the media in terms of magazines.  This is something we only loosly touched about in class.  Have you ever noticed that a males magazine will have naked women or half naked women all over the pages.  This is what they thoroughly enjoy.  However,  a womens magazine will have pictures of females and very few males in it.  Why is this?  Well, the magazines are establishing what males and females hold in value.  Males are comfortable and dream about the women in their magazines.  Females however, are so self conscoius about their self image that they like to look in these magazines to see the latest fashion, advice, and skinny girls.  This is incredibly unfortunate as it tells women how they are to look.

Another problem within the male magazines (or at least I find it to be a problem) is the big boobs.  Most females in male magazines will have HUGE boobs.  This makes men feel like their women too should have huge boobs.  Female magazines rarley have females with huge boobs in them, and therefore, feel as if these are not important.  Since magazines unfortunatly help establish social norms, males feel if their partner has small boobs that they should persue a boob job.  While many females initially do not think to get a boob job they likely give in because of their desire to impress a man. 

I mean look at the following pictures.  Which one is more appealing to males and which is more appealing to women:

From my experience, I would think the males would be more attracted to Pamela with the giant boobs opposed to the other girl who I think is far prettier than Pamela. 

Anywayz, I just wanted to show how something as simple as a magazine can influence social perceptions of what is a norm and what is not.  It is amazing to think that something so “fake” as a magazine contributes to the way we think and feel.  Scary isn’t it!

Has anyone had a huge desire to go to Africa?  I sure have.  Most want to go to make a difference and I admit I do too.  However, to me making a difference isn’t just helping the continent deal with Aids or their war torn countries.  While these are all incredibly important, making a difference to me is so much more.  Making a difference is allowing them a shoulder to cry on, making a difference to me means really letting them know that you AREN’T going to give up on them.

This is why I have choosen to go to Africa after I am done school! I hope to go to the refugee camps to make a difference in them.  So many people go to Africa to the resorts, and when I bring up my desire to go to Africa people call me crazy.  But, I think they are crazy.  Who wouldnt want to go somewhere and make a difference.

The other reason I want to go to Africa is something no one else ever really talks about.  I want to go to learn something very important.  It seems in the world according to North America, that we can’t be happy without material things.  We get bored, when we have to entertain ourselves.  We our happy when we have enough money to buy something.  TV and videogames, and other technologies occupy our time so that we don’t have to be creative.  However, in the tribal areas of Africa they smile with no money.  They laugh with no money.  They are genuinly happy people, living in a world of poverty.  And no one stops and admires this.  Why is this so?  I don’t know, I just don’t have the answer but I am eager to learn.  I want to know what that feels like to not be so dependant on material objects.  I want to learn what it feels like to not listen to music and appreciate it but to make music, to make clothing, to dance important tribal dances.  I want to play soccer with my bare feet and I want to laugh and smile because I have found what it feels like to be happy as a person, and not happy because I am dependant on other things to make me happy.  I think this is a lesson Africa can teach the so called “modern world”!

I am not trying to blame the media for this, instead I am just seeing from my own experiences how much I depend on the media to keep my happy and content.

I am in my third year now of Unniversity and as a female I must say that even I am sick of hearing about feminism.  This seems to be the main trend for many of the Profs in the Unniversity.  Each prof seems to devote a portion of their class to feminism thoughts and theories.  And as a student I must say hearing it once was great, hearing it twice was good, even hearing it three times was fine.  But every class, I mean common.

I realize the importance of feminist theories and the things they have done for women rights, but after a while it starts to make me feel bad as a women, because we are constantly shoving this knowledge down mens throats.  And quite frankly after the third time of hearing this I start to feel bad, I feel that it makes men feel horrible, it makes them annoyed and I think telling these kinds of theories a million times throughout the course of unniversity only frustrates men into believing that women are just out to get them.

Can you imagine being in their shoes hearing about what we had done to them in the past, and having it constantly shoved down our throats in at least every class throughout the course of your unniversity career.  Would you not feel immense guilt?  I sure would, and many men today don’t believe in men being superior to females, and I think the unniversity is only trying to show this as a theory, but at the same time I think a step back needs to be taken in order to look at how shoving this theory down a mans throat affects him as a person.

I would also like to applaud this class for having no feminist content in it ( or if it did it was very little that was unnoticed by me).  In this class males and females learned together.  As a sociology class I was suprised by the little amount of theories, and the immense amount of personal thought.  I am happy to say that I believe this is the first class in which no feminist content has been presented.

Well, If anyone has read my blog faithfully, which I’m sure no one has because my thoughts are pretty random, I am a huge music fan.  I love music from unknown bands.  For instance, has anyone heard of the band called Feeder.  If you listen to their lyrics for one song, you will notice how they sing with such passion.  Why does this seem to not be important to people anymore?  The songs dominating things like MTV or Much Music are rap and R and B songs talking about getting “crunked” or shot or women.  How can these messages be far more important than that of real heart felt lyrics.

I am not saying that songs have to talk about deep love to be important or beautiful songs , because I personally am sick of hearing about those songs too.  It seems that lots of the “mainstream” rock songs all focus on this topic.  While I will be honest with you there are songs from Feeder that do talk about these things, they discuss the issues not in boy meets girl, girl and boy fall in love, and happily ever after. For example here are lyrics from my favorite song called pushing the senses

“Pushing The Senses”

Always
I can depend on you
But sometimes
It’s burning a hole right through
Keep pushing the senses through
Let’s talk about us

The lyrics just catch you.  They intrigue me, and it makes me try so hard to find some meaning in what he is saying.  I feel a deep connection with bands like these who are more focused on their music then on their money.  They sing because it is what they love to do not because it is a way to get rich and famous.  At least this is the way I percieve such individuals.

So, last class Professor Lawton mentioned that we should try to find out what a split infinitive is so I went on dictionary.com and here it is:

noun Grammar.

[Origin: 1895–1900]

—Usage note The “rule” against placing a word, especially an adverb, between to and the verb in an English infinitive (To really learn a language, you have to stay in a place where it is spoken) is based on an analogy with Latin, in which infinitives are only one word and hence cannot be “split.” The modeling of English style on Latin has in the past often been considered the epitome of good writing; the injunction against splitting the English infinitive is an example of the misguided application of this notion. Criticism of the split infinitive was especially strong in 19th-century usage guides. Nothing in the history of the infinitive in English, however, supports the so-called rule, and in many sentences, as in the example above, the only natural place for the modifying adverb is between to and the verb (To really learn …). Many modern speakers and writers depend on their ear for a natural sentence rather than on an arbitrary rule. Writers who ordinarily prefer not to split an infinitive will occasionally do so, to avoid awkward or stilted language.

Also I would like to comment about the guest speaker.  She did a really great job of talking about “Booborexia”  All her stories about people she had interviewed were so apauling.  I couldn’t believe how women really think. Well, I mean I am a women as well but I don’t feel those ways about my breasts.  But never the less, the pressure for women to look the way that TV images do is appauling.  They have great amount of pressure to look this way and that leads to the problems such as Booberexia. 

Well, to be quite honest seeing the topic that we are to discuss in these blogs for this week, made me wonder if I should even bother reading the readings for this week because it was very easy to see where this is going. 

Women for as long as Tv has been made have constantly been portrayed as either working at home mothers while the father was the bread winner or now as sexual objects while the men are the dominant speciman who gets to choose his mate.  If you really think about it the importance ads place on hypersexuality kind of makes me think of animals.  I mean think about it, when an animal mates for the most part it is the men who choose their women.  They run up to them without the females having a choice and ya the rest is history.  Therefore, proving that the male is the dominant speciman and the females are to just be the objects almost like a buisness transaction. 

For some reason ads are displayed in exactly the same sort of maner. Especially the ads in which the product being sold is a predominantly male product.  An example of this is of course beer commercials.  How many ads have you seen where a bunch of females are drinking at a table at a party with all males dancing around with their shirts off staring into their eyes oh so pasionatly. 

These ads teach young teenage girls that it is only but appropriate to act that way.  Also, they try to dress like these girls and be just as skinny as them which creates a Tsunami of problems.  No female after seeing a beautiful girl on the cover of Teen Vogue really sits down as says oh well this is air brushed and they added this and etc.. to make her look as beautiful as she does.  Instead they see a beautiful girl with no flaws, and decide that this is what they should become

The media definatly needs to be alot more conscious of the sort of messages they are sending out!

So this weeks reading is all about video games.  Well, let me tell you, as a female I pretty much wanted to run as far away from this topic as I could possibly get as soon as I found out that this is what we were to talk about.  Then, I started doing my readings for this class, and lets just say I am definatlly out of the loop with the whole technology and video gaming “society” that goes on. 

First of all I’d just like to say that video games has never been of any remote interest for me, therefore, it was extremely dificult to even motivate myself to do these readings.  However, I have finally gotten around to them and lets just say I wish I hadn’t.  The first thing I noticed was that in the reading by Lars Konzack he divides everything up into layers.  And I must say that the first 4 layers are most definatly way over my head.  I didn’t understand the fancy “lingo” he was using or the terms, even when difined made no sense.  Infact, there is even a part of his article where he says something along the lines of “but of course you knew that” and as I read this I thought actually No i am so so sooo lost!  It was not until we got to the actual game play aspects that I could some what relate to the meanings and feelings that game players experience when gaming.  However, the first 4 layers were dealing with the technology and the inner system while the last layers dealt with the external aspects of gaming. 

One thing I really liked was how the author talked about how games run in two ways either as action packed or arcade setting where everything is the same except for the fact that you can change the scenery, or narrative where a story is being told and you must go through the motions in which the story tells you too.  I found this very interesting because I never thought about how simplistic that idea actually was.  Most games are made as the action packed or arcade setting type games. 

Reading this article made me realize that video gamers almost have their own society in which no one understands but them.  They have these terms that everyone within the gaming community understands fully and can react accordingly however, for an outsider hearing these words or even the way in which the program works with in the gaming device sounds like a foreign language.

So, this weks topic is dvertising.  I read the articles last night and I must say that while I agree with some points of the articles, especially where they talk about how they hugely stereotype the roles of a female and a male, and how advertisment companies try to highly sexualize women.  I agree with all of this, but one thing I don’t agree with is the amount of influence they say the media has on young females.  While yes it is a factor I find it doesn’t have quite as huge of an effect as they claim it does.  I mean there are a lot of different factors other than just the media that lead a female to be depressed about their bodies like their friends being skinnier then them, parents telling the children they are fat, getting bullied in school! Therefore, it is not just all media.  However, I have found lately with rap being a huge musical industry that we as a society have placed an even greater pressure on females to look good.  The rap music videos highly sexsualize females, and often have them sprawled on top of something like a nice car, or riding shot gun in a car.  These kind of images show that women appear to be just another object, and are like tokens.  They are not people they are just another way for men to measure their worth.  To me, this is what many rap videos portray.  I find it quite sad to see just how complete strangers effect our every day lives.  They influence especailly females so much that females are constantly unsatisfied with their perfectly beautiful bodies.  However, we have to give credit to advertisements like the dove campaign which promoted a wide array of womens bodies, and showed them off in a bra and panties, proving their is nothing wrong with these bodies either.  While a big step it is not enough to sway the whole population, and therefore hopefully other media’s will job on this wagon.

For this weeks reading I did it on pitchfork and how they have created a new area of the music industry.  This reading was possibly one of my favorite readings I have done this year, partially because I love music, and especially love ways of finding unheard of music, and the second reason is because it made me understand more about the music industry.  First of all, I think what pitchfork is doing is amazing.  People don’t want editorial type information from journalists.  What people are interested in these days is simply what people equally as passionate about the music think.  They want people who have a general appreciation for that band to give them information.  This is why magazines like the rolling stones are starting to suffer because they are more intersted in the movie stars and easy story getters and instead pay less attention to the actual music.  The same problem is occuring with MTV and much music because they are focusing on reality tv shows instead of focusing on new music and stuff, therefore, they are starting to loose alot of viewers.  These viewers need somewhere to turn and why not turn to a web site.  Most people are always on the computer and therefore, their information is all in one place.  Although pitchfork gets criticised for alot of things, I think what they are doing is great, I think they really keep the music alive.

So, I just read chapter 13 and I must say, it is kind of a no duh chapter.  The first thing that was brought to my attention was when it started to talk about popular culture.  Now as much as it would be nice that everything could be so thought provoking and so on, but realistically, what do people use things like the television for?  We use it (or at least i think we use it) to relax.  We have thought long and hard about our tasks durring the day and sometimes people use it to unwind.  Therefore, it is not necessary that there by no high culture programs on the air.

The other issue I have with this is that something as widely used as television wants to cater to a large amount of people.  Therefore, high culture audiences are not the norm.  There are far few people that go to see an opera than go to see beevis and butthead at the movie theatre.  Therefore, in order to make a large amount of profit from television, it only makes sense to cater to the mass rather then the specific.

However, I do admit that I was unaware of the problems now being displayed in our children.  I find it alarming that children are no longer grasping the lesson, but instead, paying attention to details.  However, when I was a child (and I was not a book reader) I could always grasp the concept of the lesson.

One argument that they bring up as well is that things like books are far better for people to stimulate the mind then television.  However, I disagree with this.  What about comic books, they have no thought provoking messages to portray, it is pretty straight forward.  Also, there are many movies out there that have effected me more than any books (I do read books now) that I have read.  These movies consist of movies such as pay it forward or crash.  These movies are designed to promote a strong message tailered again to the masses.

I’d also like to point out how watching Noam Chompsky’s interviews in class last Wednesday also helped show the way the news chooses what is deemed ‘important’ news and what is not.  However, I also must admit that it was incredibly boring, and dry, which is why I think it was cut short.