Semantics And The Masculinity Behind Frat Hazing

This week’s discussion on modern manhood and gender gave me a ton of different concepts to indulge and contemplate over and I want to dedicate this post to expanding on male masculinity. Particularly with semantics and the language we use to communicate with each other. The reason why I’m interested in talking about semantics is that with regards to the contemporary lexicon or vernacular young people like myself use every day, it has come to my attention how uniformly inconsistent its become on so many levels.

Take for instance how most millennials don’t really use the term “dating” anymore, instead we say “hooking up”. Which is a bit counterintuitive for women, but not so much to men. Both men and women use this term, but both use it in two different ways and it serves as a win-win marker for both sexes. First of all, the term itself is vague (for good reason) from first base tongue action kissing to straight-up intercourse. If a guy uses it and says “I hooked up with Tina last night,” his guy friends would assume they had intercourse and he gets high-fives and labeled as a stud. If a woman uses it, but also adds a tiny detail and says “I only/just hooked up with Joe last night,” her female friends would assume they did anything but intercourse and she doesn’t get labeled as a slut. This benefits women and men, so I got to give credit where credit is due to our clever generation for coming up with yet another ingenious way for beating around the bush when it comes to sex.

I’ll be blunt and say that I am by no means an expert on these matters, but I do want to express some of my thoughts and understandings I’ve come to notice in the ways we create masculinity and what it means to be a man from personal experience. It certainly is a social construct of what we have passed down from generation to generation. Conversations about gender is an issue that remains important to both sexes, men and women that is especially prevalent to the generation of today.

Don’t get me wrong women’s lives have changed a lot, but men’s lives have changed too. I can think immediately of my own father who went to school with sex segregated classrooms, who served in an all-male military and who spent most of his working life with all-male co-workers. That world is completely gone, at least here in the U.S. There’s probably only a handful of male-only private schools, there’s no more all-male military and there’s practically no job where any male would have, where he won’t have female colleagues, supervisors or bosses. So men’s lives have changed too, but what hasn’t changed is the ideology of masculinity. Not being a “wuss,” making a ton of money and having the status to boot, be ever so calm, collected and cool with your emotions, and taking charge and being a confident risk-taker. These are all archetypical traits for masculinity that people from 2015 subscribed to just the same as the people in 1915 did.

To kick things in motion, I want to start with the pressure that young men feel to prove their masculinity and the fear of being considered a “wussy”. This fear of being an “effeminate” man is so constantly and relentlessly primed into adolescent boys at a young age and are policed vigilantly by other boys, even passed grade school. Growing up and even now I still hear what is probably the most common put-down (I’m certainly guilty of using as well) and it is “that’s so gay”. We use it so often that we’ve come to establish that its meaning has absolutely no implication with sexual orientation. When I say for example, “oh man, the teacher just assigned us last minute homework, that’s so gay,” it doesn’t mean I’m saying the teacher has an erotic interest in members of his/her own sex. It means it’s lame or bad and we justify the term by saying it’s not really referring to homosexual people, but if I said, “oh man the teacher just assigned us last minute homework, that’s so Black or that’s so Jewish,” people would freak out and bat every single one of their eyelashes. Using “gay” as a derogatory term is okay though, which again I have to say is counterintuitive.

This type of gender policing extracts from young men a sense of performance of masculinity that we are always involved in to making sure that others don’t ever get a chance to say “that’s so gay”. Similarly, I remember guys used to play this game in my high school and I felt that some of my friends were a little too invested in called “gay chicken”. And this game is also very popular among military groups or so I’ve heard, it’s a fairly simple game where guys basically take turns attempting to perform escalating homosexual feats with each other to the most extreme extent possible and the loser quits as soon as the feat becomes too homoerotic for them. Let me paint you a picture: you start off with some casual flirting telling the other guy his eyes look memorizing or by complimenting how he looks like he's been working out. Then you get a little physical, maybe a hand to the knee and slowly caressing your way up from there or a sexually arousing but gentle whisper into the canals of the other guy's earlobe. This even carries on to kisses on the cheek and borderline sexual harassment touching, but at the end of the day its just fun and games between guys being guys.

To take it a step further, we also added the phrase “no homo” at the end of every action or conversation to make sure we eliminated any possible trace of homosexuality. Guys are thinking constantly about the way we walk, talk and look like that the amount of energy we exude on policing ourselves so that others might not get the wrong impression about us is so facetious and so petty, because in the grand scheme of things it just sets us up for subversion and corruption later in life.

Furthermore there’s actually a pretty suave linguistic theorist who not only help paved the way for the “that’s so gay,” movement, but can also shed some insight behind the term, so here is one excerpt from one of his talks.

This is actually just a clip from The Interview where the film satirizes Eminem’s long history of how his songs were by and largely about calling other guys “gay” and “faggot”. When James Franco's character recites Eminem’s lyrics from his song Medicine Ball he says, “I said nice rectum, I had a vasectomy Hector, so you can’t get pregnant if I bisexually wreck ya,” Eminem does this not to directly accentuate any fears of homophobia, but proceeds to comically admit his own sexuality. The point though was that using terms like “gay” or “faggot” were but means to strip away a man’s dignity or manhood. If you wanted to offend a guy with just words, the best way to do it is to try to take away his manhood. I can vouch for this, (maybe not so much nowadays) but definitely for sure the middle school and high school me would tell you that this was by far the most effective way to really piss a guy off. It’s a kind of hurt that is deep-deep-down and visceral at the core of many men.

Another important factor that affects our generation’s male masculinity is the relationship between adults and young people. Think of our parents and our teachers and mentors who have all helped shape our individual experiences growing up. That too has certainly changed as well in this age where children are growing up "too fast" and "10 is the new 20". There is though without a doubt one crucial performativity that adults exclude themselves out of that most other cultures outside the U.S. don't have and that is the college fraternity initiation ritual a.k.a. hazing. What happens to the rookies of a football team or to the college freshmen who want to become members of a Greek fraternity when the adults leave? They’re no longer living within the boundaries of a normal society, but within the constructs of a gang-like mentality with gang-like rules. What happens is that adults start stepping back because if you don't know about it, you can't get in trouble for it (something we like to call plausible deniability, some law & order for you). Clearly some red flags should be flashing in the minds of these young men when coaches or teachers stop taking responsibility and start walking away.

There are hundreds of cultures all around the world that do very elaborate initiation rituals for their young males, where they send them off on starving pilgrimages or make them go through some arduous and difficult tests that at the end of these rituals, the young males are welcomed as full adults and most importantly by the recognition of other adults. Here in the U.S. though we have an interesting take on the rite of passage and as an example for critique we can see it here in this clip from Neighbors:

If I had to explain to outer space aliens what the concept behind these absurd ridiculous antics of fraternity initiations is that its homophobia in a nutshell. In the movie, there are a handful of students looking to pledge their allegiance to the college fraternity and they must endure very homoerotic stunts to prove themselves worthy of joining the “brotherhood”. One of the characters is renamed “Assjuice” for the entirety of the movie and even comes to accept the nickname by the end of it. The fraternity heads also make the pledges perform what is called “the elephant walk,” where guys are literally lined up side-by-side and hunch their backs so they can grab the penis of the person next to them and start walking along together. In the clip you see one of the pledges constantly disrespected and mutilated by taping him on a wall almost naked, forcing him to eat dog food and playing grotesque pranks on him relentlessly, all to prove his loyalty to the frat.

These initiation rituals don’t just apply to college-age fraternity groups, but also in sports teams, military and ROTC groups, and lest we not forget the Florida A&M hazing incident, so we know that it also happens in school bands as well. With that said, It’s painstakingly transparent and obvious that the more homoerotic the feats these rituals require, the more homophobic the culture. But that’s not the case here, in the context of the “that’s so gay,” term I described earlier, we’re not indicating homosexuality, no if the worst thing you can do to another man is to take away his manhood then that's exactly the best way to prove his loyalty to the fraternity. I mean think about it, these are the same guys coming straight out of high school, who were raised by the same type of policing with the gender constraints they’ve perceived as masculinity for their whole life up to that point. It’s not like they’re going to magically mature into refined gender ethically concerned scholars as soon as they entered college or turned 18 and are “legally” considered adults. Which begs the question of why?

What continually motivates guys to line up year after year, knowing full well the consequences of having to participate in these hazing rituals? Why would a bunch of guys go through all the suffering, pain, torture and humiliation? What would be the payoff for enduring such excruciating torment? And I think Neighbors also ostentatiously reveals that answer shown in this scene here and its summed up simply by three little words:

Bros before hoes. What these guys get for in return is “bros before hoes,” the notion that the bonds of brotherhood that you forge with your fraternity brethren are the most eternal and durable bonds you will ever form with another human being (more of hegemony at work). There’s such a romanticization of this notion that permeates through and through in our culture and sub-cultures (in Australia they're referred to as mates I believe). This is gender inequality with hierarchy elitism and conformity all bundled into one package. Sadly for women “chicks before dicks” or "sisters before misters" does not have the same resonance that “bros before hoes” has for men. I can’t speak much for sisterhood, but take any group of people male or female and have them go through the same painful and grueling treatment, that by the end of it all, what awaits them are friends for life. Who wouldn’t want that? Again though it's a matter of semantics, the meaning behind words tells us a lot about the kind of culture we live in, where in this case "brothers" does not indicate a relationship between blood relatives, but the sense of intimate camaraderie between men to rally together and form a conglomerate; a "wingman" of sorts or a "band of brothers," who will stick with you through thick and thin, looking out for one another. Think of weddings even, where we have the "best man" whose role is so much more active in the life of the groom than the bride's form of a "best friend" where they're even not called a sister or a woman, they're called a "maid of honor". Women just don't have that same kind of kinship they share with other women that men share among men.

In conclusion the language barrier of today has extensively become much more difficult to navigate and decode because we have so many more layers of noise that stands between the messenger and the receiver. Noise that we didn’t even hear 40 years ago and some of it still falls on deaf ears. I think these conversations are definitely worth having because the issues they strike are particularly salient and poignant to discuss if we wish to understand the ways in which we cultivate gender roles in the 21^st century. Much of it is due thanks to the incredible efforts of women and their movements for gender equality, but for a lot of guys though, we just haven’t quite caught up yet.

Word Count: 2015

Hegemony and Fetishization

This week's topics really piqued my interest to dive deeper into learning about damaging ideology and the idea of exotic beauty. The type of ideology I am referring to is the dominant culture or system that overruns others. In most cases, the hegemony taking place is the dominant ideology and it oppresses or changes anything outside of their system. For as long as we can trace back, the dominant power was men specifically, creating a system that overpowers women and instills their ideals and values. Cultural hegemony deals with the method of dominance from a certain leading power, which is usually white culture.

The idea of how media reinforces damaging ideology is fascinating because it goes unseen. Change moves at a very slow pace and no one really seems to recognize this. Certain media tricks you into thinking it is a more progressive piece, when in fact damaging ideologies are still intact and ultimately protected. With media all around us, all the time, this type of hegemony is unavoidable it seems. These negative ideologies are reinforced constantly, even in the more progressive pieces. When media tries to encompass new progressive ideologies, we see the same repetitive stereotypes push through. For example, in the movie Bridesmaids, we see some progressive positive movements towards equality ideals. We see an all female cast and the actresses play with dirty jokes (or typical mens humor qualities) and the movie even passes that low bar that the Bedchel Test sets. Yet patriarchal ideals are slipped in without much notice. Like the construct of marriage and how a women must give up her life for the one with her new husband. This kind of ideology stems from the idea of women being property, and marriage being the symbol of a purchase of that property. In the movie, the main character Annie, is in a state of 'Rock Bottom'. Throughout the film Annie is given blow after blow to her life, either brought on by herself or others. In this scene you can see where some patriarchal ideals are snuck in to this seemingly progressive movie.

In this clip, you see that Annie is ultimately not capable of putting her own life together. Even in the simplest way like fixing your car. This reinforces the stereotype that women need a man to be put together or whole, and that Annie is not capable of taking care of herself and needs a man to tell her what to do to fix it. This scene also implies the subtle stereotype that women are terrible with cars. Annie is regarded as a bad driver, and doesn't care to fix her car or know how. Therefore expressing the need for a male to help. 

We can ultimately conclude that moving away from damaging social stereotypes and patriarchal tropes is a slow moving process. This is because of the amount of unnoticed hegemonic ideals that slip in to an otherwise progressive, feminist type of media. What makes it difficult to deplete these negative ideologies? I think that these ideals are so engrained into our society that it largely goes unnoticed. This could be a result of too many men in the movie industry, as we saw in Miss Representation. Also, the media system is trading safety for progress, being afraid that too much change will result in failure of an audience.

The subject of exotic beauty really resonated with me after reading more into what was gone over in class. I realized how absolutely prevalent and normalized it is to fetishize 'exotic' women. To define fetishization, it is the selecting of characteristics of a race/culture that are deemed coveting and then assuming that all people of that race should have those qualities. For example, Yellow Fever, which is the fetishization of Asians. It is romanticizing certain qualities that are usually white-centric and not a true model of what asians look or act like. What is most fascinating to me is how normalized this is. I see ads on facebook for asian women, there is a whole porn category fetishizing the entire race of Asians, and so many more examples of this in day to day life. For example, here is a link to the Top 8 reasons why guys like Asian women where the author describes stereotypes that encompass all asian women. It is absolutely abhorrent to think that all women of a certain race would contain the exact 'Wifey' characteristics that men want. Some of the reasons include cooking, cleaning, and submissiveness, along with other qualities that a man is looking for in a mother, I mean, wife. The worst part of this racist, fetishizing, click-bait article is the pictures that accompany the 8 Reasons. 

Like this photo which accompanied Reason #7: Asian girls are submissive

How does this affect these women who don't fit into this pigeon-holed view of beauty? It ultimately creates a problematic view of what they should look like or act like. Forcing women of color into a stereotype that fits the patriarchal needs of man is problematic for their culture and self-esteem. The qualities that are desired are decided by men and if you don't fit that stereotype, you are not considered a beautiful women of color, but regarded as an 'other'. This is extremely damaging to asian women who may have hair on her body, or doesn't cook, or hates to clean. They will believe that they are unwanted because they don't fit into the regular standard of beauty as well as what is perceived as their race's standard of beauty. As well as the rest of society will uphold these standards and 'preferred' characteristics and act upon them, creating an entire system that holds unrealistic expectations of an entire race that doesn't accurately represent that race at all. 

In another article fetishizing Asian women, the author points out the key qualities that all asian women posses and why they are better than the white women, or any other women. 

"1. FeminineAsian women have held close all the family values passed on from their mothers and grandmothers before them. Values that tell women to respect their man and be submissive to them. Being feminine is an ancestral cultural characteristic that most Asian women have, one that most western women wrongly interpret as slavery. Asian women have learned to talk softly to their husbands and be submissive to them; they actually HEAR what you have to say, not just pretend and then do what they want.
2. Traditional valuesYou can expect to eat a meal from the hands of your lovely Asian lady every single day, even if she also has a full-time job and works hard at it. Your house will be spotlessly clean and well-taken care of. Try asking a western woman to cook for you on a daily basis and you’ll probably end up with a bump on your head from the flying ashtray, or with a dreadful sex-starvation week!"

This type of racism towards Asian women is just one example of how women are subjected to the qualities that men pick out. As you can see with these two qualities, it seems like a man just wants to design his own women and they project that onto Asian women, because his uncultured mind doesn't comprehend what an actual Asian women is like or that they are not all alike. Defining these traits as something for women to aspire to in order to please men is damaging for all women. Fetishization occurs with several races such as the fiery Latina as well. You can also easily recognize that most of the qualities picked out are for sexualization or objectification. Reinstating the idea that men use exotic women simply as a sexualized vacation from the traditional white beauty. This defines other races as exactly that, others. 

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Where are all the fat girls?

Growing up as a girl has taught me a lot of things about how unfair the world treats us women, but one of the most important things I have learned is that if I want to be beautiful I have to be skinny. Well I’m not. Even as a kid I was never skinny, as a teenager I was always everyones fat friend (every friend group usually has one) and even in college, I am still taught that my ‘fatness’ makes me a less than everyone else. 

This idea that women are supposed to be unrealistically thin has emerged mostly through media. Tv shows, movies, ad campaigns and music videos have set the standard for beauty, and its a standard that alienated women above a certain dress size. 

I was really interested in the idea of hegemony that was introduced this week, because it definitely explains why the fat characters that we do see in media are portrayed in negative ways. Hegemony is the process or ways that people who support the prominent ideology maintain their upper hand. This process only works when they (people who support the main ideology) are able to make radical or opposing views believe that they have been successful in gaining the changes they wanted. Meaning that when women express the need for more diversity of women in media, media will attempt to placate them by giving them a few fatter characters. But the problem is that the women they give us are few and far between and are often only there to be the butt of a joke. Fat actresses are never given a complex character, but instead you can pretty much predict the jokes that are going to be made by or about them.The representations of heavy women are extremely damaging, but we are supposed to be placated by the fact that at least they have some representation. 

I wanted to focus on the character of Fat Amy from the Pitch Perfect movies to show this hegemony in action. Pitch Perfect got ample praise for casting Rebel Wilson in the movie as Fat Amy, because to most it looked like fat women were FINALLY being cast in a successful movie all about girl power. So obviously nothing could be problematic about it because it is supposed to be hailed at an amazing feminist masterpiece. WRONG!! First and foremost naming a character “Fat” anything is so extremely harmful and for that singular reason girls should stop thinking that this movie is about empowering anyone. 

Even though Fat Amy can be a pretty funny character, where do we draw the line between funny and harmful? The three points that I am going to address are areas that I think take it to far. There has to be a way to be a fat actress that can be funny but without it revolving around their fatness. 

Why is Fat Amy’s name so harmful? Amy is introduced through her weight. Fat is the first thing anyone hears about her at all, its the first thing people say when they talk about her. This means that there is already a connection between Amy and fatness, beyond what people can see with their own eyes. They try to explain this away by having Amy introduce herself as Fat Amy, which apparently gives her agency over what she is called. However, this is only used for comedic effect and just reaffirms the idea that a fat character is there just to make jokes about their own fatness. 

Amy’s character is used to uphold many of the stereotypes that we have of fat people. When the rest of the girls are running and doing cardio, Amy is seen laying on her side doing “horizontal running”. While this is supposed to be funny, it perpetuates the idea that fat people don’t exercise, they are lazy and are unable to be active. She is also connected with food a lot through out the movie. She references food like when she says “I’ll finish you like a cheesecake”, or when she is actually assaulted with a burrito. Fat people in general are always seen as food centric and when she is the only character that is seen so involved with food, the stereotype is upheld. 

Why are the stereotypes that Fat Amy helps to maintain so harmful to real life girls? They are bad because they are usually the easiest way to pick on a fat person. It is where the majority of fat shaming takes place. When all fat people are reduced down to those who refuse to be active and eat all the time, it creates the idea that all fat people are like that. That none of us are able to exercise and eat healthy. This leads to not only skinny people fat shaming but also fat people thinking themselves unable to do those things. It makes people self-conscious about eating  or exercising in public, which only furthers negative stereotypes. And in fact fat shaming or making fun of fat people doesn't magically make them a perfect size two, it actually can make people fatter. 

Fat shaming makes people fatter

Weight stereotypes are completely arbitrary and are not usually true

Even if people are heavy they can still do some crazy exercises that some skinny and "athletic" people can't even do. 

Another problematic issue connected to Amy and Pitch Perfect is the idea that fat people can not be loved just for themselves. It is common to see the sitcom set up of a fat or traditionally unattractive man with a wife who is extremely skinny and beautiful, but flip that around to a heavy woman with an attractive, fit man and we are simply asking for to much. But women do want to see that, heavy women specifically want to see that we are not destined to live our lives alone and that we can also be choosy with who we go out with. Here is where Pitch Perfect perfectly (ha ha) uses hegemony to give us a taste of that while still holding up the societal norms. 

So many fat guys with hot wives and not a single fat wife with a smokin husband

In the movie Amy and an opposing A Cappella captain Bumper have a weird romance thing going on. We are supposed to be happy that a fairly attractive and some what fit guy would ever go for the heavier Rebel Wilson, but their whole relationship started off with him calling her “the grossest human being” he had ever seen. Hmmm what a healthy and empowering relationship they have there (lots of sarcasm behind that). But any fat girl who has been on the dating scene has probably heard one of these “you would be even prettier if you just lost some weight” or “you are pretty cute for a fat girl” or the ever lovely “I usually don’t go for the heavy girls, but there is just something about you”. But Pitch Perfect takes this to an even crazier level, actually calling someone the “grossest human being”. But hey at least we have a fat girl in a relationship right? 

Although I have picked apart at Pitch Perfect, they are not the only perpetrators of this. Most of Melissa McCarthy’s movies are great for Hollywood to say “hey fat girls you have Melissa McCarthy playing main characters that should be enough”. And most movies or shows don’t even have a “fat” character. 

But it’s not entirely that bad. We live in a really weird time where fat shaming is at an all time high (mostly due to the internet giving us easy access to shame who ever we want) but there is also a huge rise of body positivity as well. 

Beauty ad campaigns have been attempting to send messages of body positivity. Dove has been a leader in this by trying to be more inclusive in the women that they have as models for their products. This includes may women of color, older women and overweight women. Companies like dove have been attempting to counter ads like those that come from Victoria’s Secrets which promotes a standard that only like ten people can achieve. 

And TV and Movies have had a few successes with trying to incorporate women that are heavy in ways that don’t make them the joke. Queen Latifah was always a good bet on seeing a women who is not a size two having a complex leading role. We also have the amazing Donna Meagle on Parks and Rec whose weight has never been a joke, its never been commented on and while she is a secondary character she is a complex and developed character. And most importantly she reminds you to TREAT. YO. SELF. 

So how do we make more characters like Donna Meagle stars instead of harmful characters like Fat Amy? 

Word Count: 1400

Beauty in the Media

Beauty: "the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind" (dictionary.com). This concept seems pretty straight forward. For something or someone to be beautiful, they must have any quality, whether it be looks or personal traits. Beauty cannot be pinned to one specific physical feature, yet this is exactly what our media has done to women in the limelight, which has trickled down and given a false meaning and representation to all women and girls of what it is to be beautiful. When the media is so central and influential in our lives, how can we ignore these impossible standards and set our own rules for beauty, and what are the false effects of listening to the media? 

When I googled the term "beautiful woman", this was one of the first images to pop up on my search. I am not denying that she is beautiful, or saying that she should be shamed for her looks in any way. But this image has a lot in common with the hundreds of other photos that came up in my simple search. She is white, thin, large breasted, wearing little clothing, has delicate yet prominent facial features, big lips, has full curly hair, wearing makeup, and is not smiling. This is the standard of beauty that the media has set for all women in society. These standards are unrealistic for all women. Not only does this look take hours to accomplish, but not everyone can even hope to look like this standard of beauty. One image that comes to mind on how the look in Hollywood is unnatural even to these women is this:

This statement speaks volumes on the look of beauty. Not only is the standard in the media achieved by "hundreds of dollars and professionals", but she then goes on to give the sarcastic statement that "you too can look like this". She is fully aware that what people see in her for beauty in this instance is the hours of time and care she put into her looks. But is she not still beautiful without that hair, the makeup, and the hours of primping?

The answer here is yes, she is still beautiful. Not only is she a natural beauty on the outside, and shown here even smiling without all the glam, but she has the qualities the media does not talk about in terms of beauty, which is what can be found on the inside. She is loved by us regular folk for her sarcasm, independence, clumsiness, and how she can be "one of the guys". 

When I googled "exotic beauty", this photo well represents the kind of images that showed up on my search page. There were many light skinned women, even white, with dark hair, clearly "not from here" with clothes from their country, but still with many characteristics of my "beautiful women" search. These women are still thin, with similar facial features, curly hair, and very light skinned. Media has portrayed to us that women of color, women from other cultures, or not our "normal" standards of beauty, should be seen as exotic. Here is another example of exotic beauty:

In the case of this woman, we have actually put her in a photo with a tree just to show how exotic she really is. This woman is clearly beautiful, makeup and all, but why must we see her as "exotic", or not "normal" beauty? The media has told us that this woman does not meet our standards because of the color of her skin. While still beautiful, she is seen as different from "our beauty". 

Photoshop plays a huge role in the unrealistic standards of beauty. Even the women we see as "perfect" and "beautiful" do not look the way we think they do. Even with all the primping, they still undergo touch ups after the photos are taken. To see how photoshop works, and the negative impacts it has on women, click here. Photoshop gives women a sense of how we should look, when the women in these photos have been altered in terms of their skin color, weight, eye color, face shape, hair, and much more. The implications of these images are tragic. Girls believe they need to be thinner, to be unhappy with the way they look, and that they need to look like a celebrity in order to be satisfied. 

Here are just a few of the countless number of body shapes that a woman can have. This does not make them less beautiful, it makes them human. Here are some examples of beautiful women that do not meet our media's standards:

Adele

Kelly Clarkson

Lupita Nyong'o

These women are not seen to the standards of beauty, but have talent if nothing else. Why must we judge them on their looks, which are beautiful, rather than what they have to offer in terms of beauty? 

What happens when we listen to the media and decide that our natural beauty is not enough? We put women and girls under pressure to look an ideal way. We tell them they are not good enough. They develop low self esteem, eating disorders, believe they fit into a category of beauty and do not appreciate the beauty of others, and will do just about anything to be "beautiful". We get shows like The Swan:

In this show, women who are judged "ugly" enter into a beauty contest. But before they are allowed into the contest, they undergo a transformation. This includes boob jobs, nose jobs, chin implants, lip lifts, and countless other surgeries in order to meet the media's standards of beauty. This show is sickening to say the least. Women lose the entirety of who they are physically in order to meet societies set of rules. Women in the show say things like"people don't understand what it's like to feel ugly", and "I'm afraid no one will love me". Well, we do understand. Women know and feel the pressures, and we are made to feel alone in our "ugliness". To say that no one will love you just shows the low self esteem of women because of the pressures put on us by the media. If we do not look like supermodels or Hollywood actresses, we are told we are automatically ugly. But how can we change this? How do we set our own standards for beauty?

Women need to ignore the media. Yes, this is hard, but we can do this by understanding that the beauty we see is not only unreal, but unachievable. By understanding this, and knowing women in Hollywood feel these pressures as well, we have some weight lifted off of us. We need to know that we are not alone. Most importantly, we need to realize that we are beautiful in all sorts of ways, just the way we are. It is ok to do our hair and makeup, to dress up nice, but it is also ok to do the opposite. We need to let our other beauties shine through, like our talents, our brains, our humor, and our kindness. Only then can we and the world see ourselves as good enough and beautiful.

Word count: 1207

Hegemony: The A.I. supercomputer

Today’s blog post will be dedicated to discussing the topic of hegemony and how it functions in our culture. Hegemony basically pertains to the social, ideological and cultural influences that a dominant group, entity or set of beliefs exerts over others. A quick Google search will tell you that cultural hegemony is a theory that was developed by Antonio Gramsci. While he did not coin the term himself, Gramsci was known for expanding on the theory; all while in the comfort of a nice cozy prison cell. Yes, Gramsci was imprisoned for opposing the Italian fascist government ruled by Mussolini in 1926. Further information about Gramsci can be found here.

Gramsci was concerned with the dichotomy between that of the working class and the ruling class. At the time, during the late 1920s, working class movements were dwindling and fascism was steadily on the rise. Gramsci inquired to why the working class revolution weren’t exactly up-in-arms overthrowing the capitalist economy? He concluded that the answer was hegemony and that it works both as coercive control (or direct force) and consensual control, which is when society as a whole accepts the world views of the dominant group. This can be achieved through control of the media, legislation, education, entertainment, medicine, religion, politics, economics and the list goes on and on.

An ideology undergoes hegemonic status when it becomes common sense to everyone and is immersed into the culture. An example of this is the “American Dream,” the belief that if we pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and put in the hard work we can eventually earn a good living for ourselves. Hegemony does become problematic when it isn’t at all true for the most part. We can take the American Dream scenario and based on the reverse of that belief infers that if you’re struggling in life, it’s because you are lazy and you didn’t work hard enough, which doesn’t exactly apply to everyone and vice versa if you work hard you will be bestowed great fortune, which again isn't true for everyone.

Some examples of these over-generalizations include the notion that "bigger is better" as seen in this clip from an AT&T commercial:

The man in the suit uses specific words to elaborate the better choice between the two. He says “would you rather play basketball in a big fancy stadium or in a small driveway?” The commercial further hints at the assumption that playing basketball in a larger arena will lead to having more fans as the little girl suggested, reinforcing why the idea of bigger is better.

Another example is how the institution of marriage should consist of one man and one woman (slowly changing) or even that marriage itself should be the ultimate goal of every romantic pursuit. 

Take this advertisement from Tiffany and Co. into consideration:

Tiffany and Co. do a different take on the classic engagement ring and it works for reeling in their target audience of men, but at the same time it still means marriage and specifically same-sex marriage should be the goal of every couple's romantic endeavor. We often see marriage as the next step in a prolonged romantic relationship between two people. Is it the end all or be all of every couple's relationship? Does marriage mean that we really really love that other person? No, of course not, but it is a part of the cultural hegemony we’ve come to know so well.

Acknowledging hegemony is important so that we can understand how power works and operates on a cultural level; knowing if the dominant ideology of a culture it defines is right or wrong. Nevertheless, it’s pretty evident that most cases of hegemony reflected in our media are mere generalizations and chock-full of stereotypes. We see them all the time from movies to commercials that advertise fallacious representations of people that aren’t always true, especially regarding aspects of race, gender and age.

That’s not all to say hegemony is all bad per se (which is still just a matter of opinion), but for all the negative aspects, I think a lot of good has come from cultural and social hegemony in the 21^st century. For starters, the legalization of gay marriage indicates that we’re not as afraid or rather not ashamed of people in the LGBTQ community as much. Why getting vaccinations are good for the well-being of children or why everyone deserves free universal education. Hate it or love it though, we have to live with it and that what’s most important, to live with it. Are we sure we’re happy with the status quo? 

The issue is that hegemony hits you when you least expect it; it’s exceptionally omnipresent and tough to recognize, making it difficult to resist. Forget not knowing what the actual problem looks like; we don’t even know that there is a problem to begin with. For that reason, when a culture becomes hegemonic; it just becomes second nature to us. And that’s the big question, is this invisible veil of influence a threat to society? This is certainly a progressive question that deserves a progressive answer. Hegemony is always in a state of flux; adapting to maintain its dominance and in order for that to continue it must consequently compromise, convert and acclimate in order to convince and persuade subordinate cultures that its within their best interest to fall in line with the current hegemonic system. What I just described sounds like the motives for an artificial intelligence robot programmed to take over the world and tell me I’m not wrong here; hegemony be a scary mistress.

On the surface, cultural hegemony becomes very broad and with repetition it continually constructs a narrow framework for how people ought to look like and behave. It may seem like its common sense and considered best for society as a whole, but deep down these notions are still stripping people of their individuality. The media is probably the biggest and most pervasive form of control that hegemony operates through. We have to be intrinsically precise down to the miniscule details and fine print with what we decide to accept in the media if we wish to change the status quo. Bonnie J. Dow wrote a detailed analysis for what not to do with her 1990 critique on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Even though it was considered a “radical” movement in television at its time for focusing on a female lead who goes against the grain of society where female roles in television were being characterized in so few roles, such as the docile kowtowed housewife or the love interest of another man. Yet the show continued to incorporate the same set of notions of what roles men and women ought to have and act; ergo contradicting feminist ideology. 

Dow’s critique on the TMTMS states that “those who champion the oppositional ideology may be satisfied that their demands are having an impact on television, while those who create the programming [the dominant group] actually have only made cosmetic changes in representation of the disputed group.” Dow also mentions Roland Barthes, who was a French literary theorist and he had a very interesting term he used in his studies to describe how hegemony works sort of like how subtle subliminal messages work, in which he called inoculation. Similar to the way a vaccine functions by sending just a tiny bit of the virus so that our immune system can build up a resilience to the disease; hegemony injects itself into our culture and eventually becomes a part of it.

Ultimately, we have to be careful with the types of messages we create and share; to think critically and judiciously about the things we watch or hear, because over time we too can become just as Barthes puts it, “inoculated” by false attempts for radical social change. We “think” that if the next big movie or television show that advertises an all-female cast and features all of their so-called “nonconforming” ways, we’re supposed to think it represents a vehicle for diversity and equality, but if it’s still portraying the same dominate patriarchal narratives, it’s not real change. It’s like slapping on a new license plate and calling it a new car. It’s still the same car with the same engine and all the dinks, scratches, and marks that were all previously there.

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