"Give me a god I can relate to / commandments from a voice both soft and powerful / Give me one accomplishment of Mary's that did not involve her vagina"
For years now, the media has been portraying women as the catty, skanky, appearance-obsessed humans that serve solely to please men. Women and girls are constantly being degraded and objectified to a point where the women, and young girls especially, begin to succumb to what the media feeds them. They walk into the oppression and injustice because they almost accept it as an inevitable reality.
Women don't get talked about unless it's about how much skin they're showing. There is police brutality against black women too, but it's not covered by the news. The media will encourage you to shun your awful confidence, then explicitly point out your every flaw.
There is an unrealistic, superficial standard that women must live up to in order to be considered anything at all.
The media will show Kim Kardashian in all her glory but not a female CEO.
We as a culture have been conditioned to want to see other things. We are driven towards what has been constructed as the "cool" or what a girl should be wanting to watch and feel and think and what a boy should be wanting to watch and feel and think. We reenact what we see and what we see is wrong.
Comedian Cecily Strong called out media coverage on women politicians for focusing on the appearance of the females rather than on their merit. At the White House Correspondent's Dinner, she had the audience repeat after her and take a vow that stated, "I solemnly swear not to talk about Hillary's appearance, because that is not journalism." She also made a disclaimer at the beginning where she said, "I promise, since I'm only a comedian I'm not going to try to tell you, politicians, how to do politics or whatever. That's not my job. That'd be like you guys telling me what to do with my body. I mean, can you imagine?"
She precisely called out the government's role in the dehumanization of women. Allowing anything or anyone other than themselves to govern the rights of their body is objectification at it's finest. It encourages men and women to see women as things that can easily be controlled by outside forces. It reinforces the idea that women are feeble little creatures that wouldn't know how to handle themselves.
The media, or in some cases the lack of media coverage, works to perpetuate a stereotype of dull, worthless women. The media we get now is conducive to gender segregation and oppression. People are scared of what might happen when women are able to take control. For years, there has been an accepted truth about women: that they belong in a home watching their kids and cooking a meal. Half of the population isn't ready to know what the other half is capable of.
Wow, that's a great video. I completely agree with everything she is saying. Some of the things she said I was just thinking about for the first time like, "We are the girls taught to survive by using our bodies as Swiss army knives." Another point that she makes is how nice and polite women are expected to be while men can be rude and it is out of character when they are nice. Most of the time this is true, but I think thats a huge stereotype of men being rude because I know a bunch of genuinely kind men.
ReplyDelete