Final Project - Hegemony Tycoon!

Here is a link to my final project for this Gender and Popular Culture course.

Film Response to Gia: Fairytales

Once upon a time in a kingdom far, far away, there lived a young girl, whose hair was made of gold. The people in the village saw her, and said, “Oh how beautiful she is”.

This is the first line of the fairytale that Gia Marie Carangi narrates throughout the movie Gia. It closely resembles the beginning of many other traditional fairytales, and it also mirrors the events of Gia’s own life. Eventually, however, Gia’s fairytale begins to diverge from traditional stories, and her own life begins to turn for the worse. In addition, the themes presented by traditional tales reinforce the same hegemonic systems that fashion magazines do. There is a difference between the fairytales and magazines, though, and it comes from the very conflicting messages that magazine readers receive.

This first section of Gia’s fairytale is very relevant to her early life. Gia’s mother constantly lauds her daughter’s beauty, and when Gia grows up, she is persuaded to join the fashion industry. Just like in traditional tales, the female protagonist is usually a beautiful young girl. Although their status and backgrounds may be different at first, they most likely end up in a position of wealth and happiness by the end of the tale.

And they showed her a beautiful house on the planet Mars. And they said “Come and live here forever” And the young girl said “Oh, Mars is a planet where life is different, say, clean and pretty.” But, how do you get there? Where do you find the taxi? Which bus do you take? And how do you know you’re there when you’re there?

This section of young Gia’s fairytale tells the of the character’s “transformation”. The protagonist, who may be plain and ordinary at first, transforms into someone extraordinary, someone that others cannot take their eyes off of. The “Mars” in Gia’s story is meant to represent Gia’s trip to New York City and her break into the fashion industry, which is indeed a place where life is different. New York City transforms Gia from a tomboy from Philadelphia into a fashion superstar. It is worth noting that during this transformation, one of the conflicting messages of fashion magazines arises. Wilhelmina Cooper, who helps Gia get her foot in the door of fashion, mentions that Gia’s tomboy manner of speaking is not required, nor encouraged, in the industry. Citing numerous examples of advertising that persuade women to “be silent and let their clothes do the talking”, Jean Kilbourne asks in her article “‘The More You Subtract, the More You Add’”, “Is this harmless word-play, or is it a sophisticated and clever marketing ploy based on research about the silencing of girls…?” (264). In the movie, Cooper tells Gia that if she wants to say something, she should say it through her pictures and her image. However, what can one say through these images when the overwhelming message is “sex”? Girls read in magazines that they can “make a statement without saying a word”, but what they’re not told is that the only thing they’re saying is “sex”.

And she went to live in the beautiful house. And all the people loved her and she was very, very happy. But the people in the village were very poor, and every night, they crept into the house where the girl slept, and they cut off a piece of her golden hair, and they sold it for money. “She’ll never even notice,” they said. And soon, all the gold was gone from her head.

In this section of Gia’s fairytale, we see a bit of a divergence from the traditional storyline. Normally, the protagonist may face some sort of conflict, and when it is resolved, she will live happily ever after. In Gia’s story, she should have lived happily ever after once she became a famous supermodel. However, the fashion industry began to take its toll on Gia. Just as the villagers cut strands of the girl’s golden hair, every photograph that Gia allowed to be taken removed a piece of her identity. Every time she allowed her image to be sold, she lost a part of herself. From here, the story is all downhill. Gia checks in and out of rehab centers to combat her growing drug addiction, but always returns to her old habits. Eventually, the fashion industry’s conflicted hegemonic system prevents Gia from being able to obtain more work. Diana Crane’s “Gender and Hegemony in Fashion Magazines” explains that “Fashion as a form of media culture can also be interpreted in terms of conflicted hegemony. …there is no single fashion standard; the consumer chooses from different interpretations of fashion, depending on her social affiliations and ethnic background.” (316). The fashion industry needs multiple styles consistently changing in order to keep consumers interested. Like with the girl’s golden hair, once everyone had seen enough of Gia’s image, there was nothing left to sell.

And the people said, “Oh, she’s not beautiful at all.” And they took her from the beautiful house, and they drove her into the street, and she went away, and she never came back. And soon people became hungry again, and they went back into the beautiful house, looking for gold, but there was no one there.

The final part of young Gia’s fairytale is certainly not consistent with the endings of other stories. Instead of “happily ever after” the girl is ejected from her life of happiness once she is no longer of any value to the people. She then disappears into obscurity and never returns. It is in this section that we see a clear difference between a traditional fairytale’s message to children and a fashion magazine’s message to older women. Children read that they can simply be young and beautiful, and everything will come together in the end. The fashion industry, however, has an additional string attached, which is that one can only be beautiful if they’re worth something to somebody. Models are no longer beautiful if their image fails to sell products. Average people are not beautiful if they aren’t buying the right products. In the end, young Gia’s fairytale is more representative of the fashion magazine’s message than that of traditional tales.

Although most would view Gia’s fairytale and her own life as having unhappy endings, the movie portrays Gia herself as satisfied with her life in the end. She claims “It was worth it, for having been allowed to walk where I've walked.” This causes us to reevaluate the idea of success. Is success measured by your status and state of mind when you die? Or is it measured by the overall accomplishments of your life, despite how it all ends? For Gia, the fame and happiness she had earlier in her life outweighed the sadness of dying of AIDS in a lonely hospital bed.

References:

• Crane, Diana. "Gender and Hegemony in Fashion Magazines." Gender, Race, and Class in Media. pgs. 314-332. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2003.
  

• Killbourne, Jean. “‘The More You Subtract, the More You Add.’" Gender, Race, and Class in Media. pgs. 258-267. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2003.

Collage - The Ideal Consumer

Sex Sells, or Selling Sex?

Looking at the collage I posted previously, you can see a number of advertisements that clearly revolve around using highly sexualized images to sell a product. When looking through my friend’s Cosmo magazine to find these images, paging through advertisements for perfume, cologne, jeans, and vodka, I initially didn’t think too much of them. It didn’t surprise me to find that these companies were using sexualized images in order to sell their products. I suppose that I’ve become accustomed to these practices, growing up in the 90s and beyond. However, after thinking about it for awhile, I had to wonder how a beautiful woman in a dress with generous cleavage had anything to do with selling vodka. Why does an advertisement for clothing contain a woman who is only wearing something on half of her body? Most of these displays go against the main idea of advertisements, which is to inform the reader of the product. What, then, are we being told about this particular brand of vodka or clothing?

The first step in understanding this is to realize that the message of these ads is different for men and women depending on which gender is portrayed in the advertisement. In the situation of a sexualized woman, the message to men is “Use this product, and score this woman!” To women, these advertisements say “If you want to look as beautiful as me and score a beautiful man, you’d better buy this product!” The messages are essentially reversed if a sexualized man is portrayed. So what is a consumer to do when he or she tries to decide which product is better when all the advertisements are saying the same thing? Decide based on which model is more beautiful? In this situation, many magazines will offer articles detailing information on some of the advertised products, and although this is often simply a ploy by advertisers to increase awareness of a product, it can also help consumers make informed decisions. After all, an article about a product is more useful than an advertisement where a dolled up model simply holds the product in a titillating pose. In this sense, the editors of Ms. Magazine, who decided not to accept advertisements if it meant publishing articles relating to the ads themselves, were actually hindering their readers’ decisions. As Gloria Steinem said in her article, "Sex, Lies, and Advertising", "...we would add the best ads for whatever traditional 'women's products' that surveys showed Ms. readers used. But we would ask them to come in without the usual quid pro quo of 'complementary copy.'"

Another component of these sexualized images is the objectification of each sex. If the models are objectified, then the viewer feels less remorse in heavily desiring that image, and therefore is more inclined to buy the product. One of the ways this objectification is achieved is through the “dismemberment” of the models. As you can see in the collage, some images have been cropped to not include the model’s head. This draws the viewer’s attention to the more “desirable” parts of the body: a woman’s breasts or a man’s bare chest, and a woman’s long, slender legs or a man’s firm, muscular arms. In addition to this, however, it serves to hide a person’s face, which is their identity. Stripping the models of their identities reduces them to mere objects, existing only to be desired and obtained. This is a similar tactic to that used in Esquire magazine, where articles and comics depicted women as “only good for sex”, after discrediting their opinions, tastes, and morals. As Kenon Breazeale stated in his article "In Spite of Women", "Men do not need the power to dominate women politically, the magazine implied, when they can exercise the pure control of fetishized pleasure over any woman who swims into their line of sight."

The main purpose of these sexualized advertisements is perfectly summarized in the collage, at least for those targeting men. A male consumer is lured in with the promise of beautiful women surrounding him if he purchases the product, while at the same time learning no actual information about the product. What makes Skyy a better product over another brand of vodka? A viewer of these advertisements would never know, especially if both brands used the same types of images to market their product. If people accept that “sex sells” is a common notion, then it is likely that they are much less affected by those types of advertisements than others. In this case, advertising has failed because these viewers simply glaze over sexualized images, rarely giving them a second glance, and when they do, they find little to no information about the product.

References:

• Breazeale, Kenon. "In Spite of Women." Gender, Race, and Class in Media. pg. 239. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2003.
• Steinem, Gloria. "Sex, Lies, and Advertising." Gender, Race, and Class in Media. pg. 223. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2003.

Gender Not Included? An Analysis of Children's Toy Marketing

When I first set out to analyze the types of toys that are marketed to children, I admit that I had many preconceived notions about how toys are separated by gender. When starting up a simple search on Amazon.com or the Toys R Us website, I expected to find the toys for girls to be a shower of pink and purple, and the toys for boys to be full of action and shiny metal parts. While searching for gender-neutral toys, I expected to see those that more closely resemble toys for boys. These notions come, of course, from my experience as a child and the types of toys that I saw some years ago. Obviously, with my being only 22 years old, things couldn’t have changed much.

I first searched the toys section of Amazon.com for something that would appeal to a 7 year-old girl, as stated by the note card I was given. Right off the bat, Amazon had separate categories for “toys for girls” and “toys for boys.” The girls’ category showed me a picture of some pink, fuzzy creature, a “Fuzz Luv,” and the boys’ category showed me a picture of a remote controlled helicopter. Diving further into the girls’ category, I saw things such as the “Barbie Totally Real House Playset,” which lets young girls play with a “mechanical washer and dryer with real spinning action.” What kind of message is this giving off? That you can be as “beautiful” as Barbie, yet you should be properly experienced with these domestic tasks? Advertised for the “stylish” girl, this sort of toy, along with most other Barbies, teaches girls what society believes is beautiful, perpetuating what Wolf calls, “The beauty myth.” Wolf states, “The beauty myth tells a story: The quality called ‘beauty’ objectively and universally exists,” (121).

Moving on to the “toys for boys,” I found that I didn’t even need to search Amazon for an example of boys’ marketing; the television was all I needed. While watching primetime television, an advertisement for the “Tonka Scoot ‘n’ Scoop” came on. Its catchphrase was something along the lines of, “Let’s face it, boys are built differently! Here’s a toy for them!” Drawing such a blatant gender line like this can only further convince parents that children should be kept separate by gender. Searching for products on Amazon however, did not turn up such distinct differences. In fact, the “toys for boys” category turned up many results for gender-neutral toys like board games, scooters, and drawing kits. Could this imply that it’s “okay” for girls to play with toys aimed at boys, but boys playing with girls’ toys is not acceptable? Certainly, if a young girl exhibited certain “male” qualities, she might be dismissed as a tomboy who would “grow out of it.” However, a young boy with feminine qualities might trouble some parents and drive them to seek help or advice. Messner found that through interviews relating to boys and the desire to play sports, “It was just the thing to do,” (123), and this idea can relate to children’s toys as well.

In order to specifically search for gender-neutral items, I used Toysrus.com, since Amazon did not have a “toys for both” category. The items that came up were mostly similar to Amazon’s “toys for boys” group, but there was one that struck me as interesting: the Nintendo Wii game system. There are some other gaming systems out there, namely the Xbox and Playstation, but neither was as high on this list as the Nintendo Wii. While the other systems offer a variety of mature titles and a controller with numerous buttons and triggers, the Wii offers games that appeal to all ages and genders, along with an intuitive control scheme. I believe that Nintendo initially created the Wii to bridge a generational gap, but in doing so, also bridged a gender gap that has recently been ignored by other systems.

After performing this research online, I found that my expectations more or less matched up with what I found. Things haven’t changed much since I was a child, and it appears that it will take some time before the lines between “toys for girls” and “toys for boys” become completely blurred. It is difficult to say if this is the preferred result, however. I can’t speak for girls who grew up playing with dolls, but as a male who grew up with action figures and video games where the hero always saves the princess, I don’t feel as if having only neutral toys as a child would have profoundly shifted my development. After all, toys are only one aspect of the media that shapes us.

Toys Examined:

http://www.amazon.com/Barbie-Forever-Totally-House-Playset/dp/B000BCEJI6/ref=sr_1_23/002-6546436-9625635?ie=UTF8&s=toys-and-games&qid=1191296617&sr=1-23

http://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-Playskool-Tonka-Scoot-Scoop/dp/B000OV7A6C/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-6546436-9625635?ie=UTF8&s=toys-and-games&qid=1191304622&sr=8-1

http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2549771&cp=2255974.2290625.2290630.2290641

References:

• Messner, Michael A. “Boyhood, Organized Sports, and the Construction of Masculinities.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (January 1990). Sage Publications, Inc.

• Wolf, Naomi. “The Beauty Myth.” Women: Images and Realities. (120-125). McGraw Hill. 2003.