“Codes” of Gender…Post turned light bulb moment

This is not the first time I’ve watched the film Codes of Gender. Being a Film and TV studies major this movie is in fact what we discuss and analyze a lot of the time! Stereotyping females and males to act, look, and dress a certain way throughout media is one of the biggest problems our society faces today.

            From a female’s standpoint I hate how there is a certain emphasis on the way I’m supposed to look physically, like every time I pose for a picture I feel the need to place my hand whimsically in the air by my face. Why? Because advertisements continuously show us that this is the way pretty women are supposed to look. Like this magazine ad for Covergirl:

I agree with an earlier post from Rob Fucela when he said, “There is nothing natural about gender identity. When I was younger I never thought about why boys wore blue and girls wore pink, it was just normal to me.” Just like I never thought about why girls were always half naked in magazines and why guys always had muscles out the crazy, it’s just what always was. Watching this movie the second time not only reinforced the ideological view we (myself included) have of what male and female should look like, but also made me take a deeper look into the issue. I’m guilty of laughing in class when I saw men positioned in what is stereotypically a female position such as this:

It was funny. It was out of the ordinary.

But then I instantly thought, that’s BRILLIANT!

What better way to break these gender “codes” then to well, break them.

This posts goes out to all of you who, like myself, are sick of succumbing to the gender roles we are being spoon fed through the media. Let’s not watch a movie like Codes of Gender, shrug our shoulders, and leave the classroom saying, “whelp that’s just the way it is” and go about our day. Let’s take what we just learned and change it.

I like to mess around with photography every now and again and for me, I decided that I am going to try my hardest to no longer take pictures of people placed in the “codes” society has set. Up until now when I took senior portraits I did use stereotypical poses for what male and females normally look like, but not anymore!

Codes of Gender had my mind going in 100 different directions of how I could make a difference with this issue or if anything I decided to do would actually change anything.  Maybe it will or maybe it won’t, but this video made me realize that it’s worth a shot to try.

I think it’s fair to say that not everyone had such a big light bulb moment after watching this film like I did, but I hope that all of you realize this is a problem we face and that maybe you’ll take a couple minutes to look into your own life and see what you can do to help change it.  Come on, I dare you!