Gender Roles in Jersey Shore and Guys with Kids

Princess Culture and Football

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/lifestyle/2012/11/girl-football-star-sam-gordon-9-wows-with-spectacular-highlight-reel/

The above is a link to an article about a 9 year old girl who is good at playing football. I saw this news story on TV and the show I was watching did not answer all of my questions as to why this girl was playing football. When I went to look up the story of Sam Gordon, I stumbled across the ABC news story. I read the article which states that though football is not her first love in sports, she wanted to take it up after watching some college games with her dad. When she started playing she was really good. She is even tackled and tackles the boys. After getting my answer to if she was pushed by her dad to play and if she had an older brother, I decided to read the comments and see what people were saying. I found that the only two people to comment on the story were blaming her father that she was playing, saying that he wanted a boy so he took it out on her.

This is playing into the princess culture that is out there. Even though she says in the article that football is not her first love, she says she enjoys scoring touchdowns. The first comment by Ron Ruys says that her parents are sick and that they probably wanted a boy. What he does not mention is that in the article the father states that they have an older son and that he would play roughly with her in soccer and that she was unfazed with it. Ruys also goes onto mention that since her parents are probably pushing this boy aspect on her, that she will grow up to be “confused”. This seems to be from someone who has never taken a pop culture class, or he would see that these stereotypes are forced on children. The little girl states in the article that she does have enjoyment playing football and that her first love is soccer. In the princess culture playing sports is not something that little girls are supposed to do, but thanks to Title IX more girls who want to play sports get to play and beat down this stereotype. He may also not have noticed that in the skype interview the girl is wearing a pink shirt and her hair is down. Though if the girl picked this out on her own or her parents told her to wear it, we may never know. The second comment left by T.bayloney says that they are “between the two extremes”. They claim that the dad is “obviously playing out his unrealized dreams”. This claim is unfounded in the article seeing as it never states that the dad played football, all it says is that they were watching a BYU football game together. Which by society standards is the “normal” guy thing to do. After these remarks the commentator then says that he built up their own daughter with encouraging comments. Both these people highlight that in it is popular to fall in line with pop culture. Even though princess and superhero culture are not a natural thing. I personally hope this little girl continues to fight the stereotype that little girls are not good at and should not play sports for as long as she still finds enjoyment from playing them.

Codes of Gender and a Korean Air Commercial

This is a 30 second ad for Korean Air, I viewed a similar ad for them on CNN. The ad mainly consists of beautiful women, with men only showed twice. These people are at each of the destinations that Korean Air goes to and can be seen as a good case study for what was talked about in the Codes of Gender video that we watched in class. In most scenes the women are seeing lounging, eating food or staring off into space. The commercial starts off with a woman laying on her side caressing the cloud dreamily, then moves on to a woman twirling a parasol and staring off into space, while lounging on rocks. These scenes tie back to what was said in the video called Code of Gender, the women are paying no attention to the surroundings. They are either daydreaming or so focused on one thing that they do not care about their surroundings. There is also a beauty aspect that plays into two of the scenes. One scene is where a woman with her arms open wide and another where a woman is putting on lipstick to go out. The woman who is with her arms open is looking ahead but her arms are pulled back holding the fabric and probably would not be able to move her arms fast to stop an attacker. The other is a woman is wearing a lot of bold makeup on her eyes and this could be seen as women are not naturally beautiful and need help from cosmetics and a short skirt.

When the first guy does appear in the commercial, though both the woman and him are walking towards each other in the same way. His arms are lower and closer to his sides, unlike the woman who is walking toward him with her arms in a perfect line. The guy’s arms are closer to his body and if he were to have an attacker coming towards him then he would be able to defend himself better then the woman. The other time a man comes into the picture is when they are on the wings of a plane eating dinner. The man as his arm on the body of the plane and seems more stable, while the woman is not supporting her self and looks more like she is going to fall forward while gazing into the man’s eyes.

The commercial also uses more flying imagery with the use three airhostesses walking in tight skirts and highs heels on a tarmac with there legs crossing each other so it is not an exact line. This is not a natural walk and seems to be accentuating their natural curves. Airhostesses in a post 9/11 world need to be tough and defend the captains and the plane from attackers. The way they are presented is as a sexual docile female. The commercial ends basically the same way it started, but with the logo and “on a plane”. It ends with a woman holding a snow globe, lounged with her high heeled feet on the side and her back resting against traveller the other side gazing out the window at the clouds, which also has the airlines logo in the sky. Since she is lounged in this position she is portrayed as beautiful, docile and submissive. Though I have no clue what the beautiful female portraying these messages at each of these destinations has to do with the airline, besides that they fly to these destinations. This commercial also airs on CNN and is most likely trying to attract business travelers who go to these areas to fly on this airline and probably not the random vacation.

Disneyland and Princess Culture

For Fall Break I went and visited friends who happen to live 5 minutes away from Disneyland in California. I had read the articles before going on break and when I went to Disneyland, I noticed all the little girls wearing princess outfits. This may have been due to Halloween coming soon. We went to both parks and most of the girls in both of them were wearing the outfits. I also noticed that the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique is located right next to the castle. 

Another thing I noticed from the articles was that pink sells. My friends and I walked through Aurora’s Castle. You walk through the castle, which tells the story of Sleeping Beauty. When you get to the end of the walking exhibit they have a book that says the end on one page and on the other is Princess Aurora dancing with Prince Phillip and her dress changes colors between pink and blue like in the movie. Well when we got there, there was a mom and two little girls probably about 7 and 5. The littlest girl told her mother not to take the picture until the dress was pink, which made my friends and I have to wait since this was at the bottom of a small set of stairs and blocking the exit door. This little girl reminded me of how the article “Is Pink Necessary” by Annie Murphy Paul, who said that if the toy industry, wants to be profitable they have to have Pink. Also this little girl demanded that her mother take the picture when the dress was pink and not just let her take the picture when the mother was ready to take it. This action the girl is demonstrating, is one of the three elements that define a princess according to the article by Joanne Laucius, she is in charge.

            The last thing I noticed was in Cars Land in Disney’s California Adventure. While we were killing time before heading to World of Color, we were looking through the shops in Cars Land. The shops seemed to be geared towards boys and men. This understandable with the way we stereotype gender and that cars are supposed to be more of a boy thing. Though when you walk through the park it seems that there is a pretty diverse crowd of people there. When it was just the two of us, my friend and I went and rode the race ride by ourselves, while her husband was still at work. Also when were in line for it there was a group of three older woman and a preteen girl in front of us. So though the merchandise of this specific area may seem to be geared towards boys, it seemed to be more diverse within the actual people visiting it.

Cut the Corn?

Today in class was not the first time I have seen this documentary. Watching the section on corn reminded me of a conversation I once had with a friend after we had watched it. Her reaction was basically that she hated corn and she was upset that it was in everything. She thinks that we should get off our dependency to corn. Corn is one of my favorite starches and it is in so many things I enjoy from food to corn mazes. My first thought after she brought this up was that we are in Indiana and corn is one of the main crops produced here. To me I see corn as a major staple of life here and if we were to start majorly taking it out of consumer goods it would probably greatly harm the economy. She may only be seeing the problem of corn with the feeding it to cows, that has caused there to be a rise in e. coli break outs in beef, or she could have been thinking of high fructose corn syrup. The debate over which has even sparked PSAs paid for by corn growers. These problems with corn could lead to the decline of it being used to make food and products. Though if we start down that path how would we decide on what products can and cannot? Another question we should ask ourselves is that if we take ourselves off corn will we be opening ourselves to become addicted, so to speak, to another crop? These questions are something we may have to start looking at this problem sooner then later since there was a major drought this summer and corn production is one of the crops that suffered. In some cases I agree with my friend that we should remove corn from at least the feed of cattle to reduce the risk of e. coli break outs, but in other areas it allows products to be made more cheaply and this is beneficial to the economy. 

Military Recruiting in Pop Culture

In the article by Roger Stahl, he talks about how the military is taping into the pop culture to get more recruits. This is not a new thing and has been going on for at least over a century. The British Government used this idea to try and sell its citizens on the ideas of Imperialism and later on for fighting in wars. Their main targets were public school boys and they would try and instill these ideas to them through everything from sports to even the boy scouts. In school they would be taught the skills of what it was to be a man, as well as patriotism for ones crown and country. To instill these values they would play sports, go on camping trips, learn poetry, put on plays and even read books that showed these values. The genre of novels for boys, were like the video games of today for recruiting. The novels would have adventure stories about men in the British Army during events such as the Boer War. Though the portrayals in these novels would mostly be romantic views of life in the military. The most popular author of these books was G.A. Henty. He was a prolific writer and a journalist. He never served in the British Army, but his books featured the army. One of the main themes he used in his books was men who would shot to kill instead of wound because it was less messy. The plots of his books were also very often romanticized life in the military.

When the First World War broke out the British Government was able to see a pay off in this tactic for recruitment. In the beginning they were able to rely solely on volunteers and to keep these volunteer rates high they started a public poster campaign that appealed to not only the men, but to women. The posters were plastered in public. The ones aimed at women were to try and pressure the men in their lives to enlist or to be okay with them enlisting and not hold them back. The ones aimed at men tried to appeal to their sense of patriotism or sense of duty. The British Government was able to use these tactics until January of 1916, after the falling numbers of volunteers, they had to use conscription to get men to fight in the army. So whether you hate the idea of militarization in the public sphere or not, it can be seen in history as a handy tactic that the military can use to increase their recruitment.