I won't lie, I wrote this last night. I'm know what I want to say further on but not exactly how I want to say it. You'll probably notice a lot of redundancy in this draft, I plan to cut it down significantly later on.
Emanuel Voikhansky
English 1101
Dr. Dean-Ruzicka
9/8/2011
Pop Culture and Feminism Blog, draft 1
From the mega-movie star to the basement dwelling forum troll, everyone with an internet connection can not only consume obscene amounts of pop culture, but also add tidbits of their own. Blogs, forums, image boards, online games, social networks and never ending news reels are just a few of the ways that the relentless stream of mostly useless buzz and banter gets pipelined into our brains. Ask a person what blog they had read yesterday and they are not very likely to recall. Like drops of water in a wave, individual bits of pop culture are often small, indistinguishable in content or intellect from one another, and easily forgotten. But the sum of their weight and its impact upon modern life in America is unquestionable. How we speak, what we do, our perception of the world and even of our own selves are all affected by pop culture. It is a subtle thing, like a colored set of glasses we all chose to unknowing wear. Its only on the rare occasion that we look at something without these glasses that we suddenly realize how much of a difference they make.
A few days ago I was browsing yet another web based image board. A collective dumping ground for all things lol-worthy called 9gag. Maybe the funnies weren't as good that day, or maybe it was tad too early in the morning, but somewhere along my usual cycle of mindlessly scrolling through pages of funnies I started to pick up on a pattern. It seemed like more and more people were starting to post sexist quotes and pictures, and more often than not they were never intended to be funny. These kinds of things happened sometimes. It's usually just one guy with a folder full of pictures and an axe to grind, but something that day caught my attention. One picture in particular stood out to me, I've attached it above.
I will admit that I laughed for a good minute when I saw this, but after I was done laughing I began to wonder what exactly I had been laughing at.
The irony of someone who had been the butt end of many a stereotype joke laughing at a stereotype joke cannot be overlooked here. Irony aside though, here was a perfect cross section of pop-cultures assessment of women. In principle no different from the Neo-Nazi cartoons that portrayed me as a long nosed, hunch backed swindler out to earn money and backstab my friends. Countless examples of women in pop culture could have their perceived characters plotted on this graph, and all would fit nicely in one niche or another. Why is that? Who has the right to define social roles in such a way? And more importantly, what is it that causes these stereotypes to be so prevalent? For women and for men. These are the questions I hope to explore and attempt to answer in this blog.
For feedback, I'd really appreciate if you guys could point out which lines you like. I've included a lot of redundancy for that very reason.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how much feedback you want on this one since it sounded like you were switching topics to James Bond last week. However, I like your introduction here so far. I'd try to unpack further what the stereotypes are exactly, rather than just generalizing that stereotypes exist.
ReplyDeleteAnswer to the question: "Ask a person what blog they had read yesterday and they are not very likely to recall." I liked this line because I can't remember anything that I've read in blogs yesterday.
ReplyDeleteSpecific pop-culture item: Mostly blogs and stereotypes
Main idea: America is soaked with pop-culture--which is a collection of bits of insignificant information.
Support: The author includes a lot of metaphors and connection of his points to real life. It could be more convincing if he included more specifics and examples.
Visual elements: I found it a little irrelevant to his post. Perhaps its because this is a introduction, but for this piece of post, an image relating to blogs would have been more relevant.