Madonna Was My Idol!
I remember watching “I Love Lucy” and they never showed married couples even sleeping in the same bed. Maybe it was due to the same regulations on TV that they discussed in the story of Willow and Tara, where “their sexual relations are continually deflected and muted in terms of visual representation” (Driver, 2007). No one saw any kind of sex on the tube, and we only had three or four channels to choose from. We only got what society wanted us to believe about women, and obviously they wanted us to believe that even married women did not really like sex. At least, that was the message I got.
Things have changed so much in some ways, but stayed the same in others. We still only get the picture of others the way the media wants us to get it, yet we have become very open in the media about heterosexual relations and sex on the screen. What this says to me is that as we get socialized to accept other lifestyles, this image will become more realistic as well.
We are so conditioned by the programs and movies that we watch, that we actually want to do what they do when we grow up. I had to laugh while reading The Depth of Depp, because I remember how my sisters and I had a few idols of our own. We would hang their posters on the wall, and when we would get mad at each other, we would mark on them or tear them down, because we knew how much they meant to the other person and it was the meanest thing we could think of to do to them! In The Depth of Depp, and What Truthiness Taught Me About Being (Un) Cool, both girls want to grow up to be like their idols. Sarah states that the Harry Potter books have “had more of an effect on my life than my parents or my favorite teacher” (Schelde, 2007). How crazy is that? That our young girls learn more from the media than any where else should be a red flag to all of us, and we need to get a different message out immediately these girls.
While reading about Gwen Stefani in “Just a girl? Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth, I confess that I know nothing about her, but I do know about Madonna, who they compared her to! Madonna was my hero in those days, because she didn’t care what people thought she should be, and from what I read it appears that Stefani followed in her footsteps. The band called Shonen Knife has a song called the “Twisted Barbie” which the author states that “the song suggests that women can toy with ideals of femininity themselves as artificial (i.e., as unnatural or nonessential) as the Barbie doll” (Wald, 1998). This band has had some success in the US despite the fact that it is an all women Japanese band and that they have had to overcome a lot more than any of the white performers mentioned in this discussion to even get heard. That tells me that girl’s want something different than what they have been getting in the media up until now. Just like my generation embraced Madonna who was willing to go out on the edge, so too are our young girls looking for someone they can relate to.
Things have changed so much in some ways, but stayed the same in others. We still only get the picture of others the way the media wants us to get it, yet we have become very open in the media about heterosexual relations and sex on the screen. What this says to me is that as we get socialized to accept other lifestyles, this image will become more realistic as well.
We are so conditioned by the programs and movies that we watch, that we actually want to do what they do when we grow up. I had to laugh while reading The Depth of Depp, because I remember how my sisters and I had a few idols of our own. We would hang their posters on the wall, and when we would get mad at each other, we would mark on them or tear them down, because we knew how much they meant to the other person and it was the meanest thing we could think of to do to them! In The Depth of Depp, and What Truthiness Taught Me About Being (Un) Cool, both girls want to grow up to be like their idols. Sarah states that the Harry Potter books have “had more of an effect on my life than my parents or my favorite teacher” (Schelde, 2007). How crazy is that? That our young girls learn more from the media than any where else should be a red flag to all of us, and we need to get a different message out immediately these girls.
While reading about Gwen Stefani in “Just a girl? Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth, I confess that I know nothing about her, but I do know about Madonna, who they compared her to! Madonna was my hero in those days, because she didn’t care what people thought she should be, and from what I read it appears that Stefani followed in her footsteps. The band called Shonen Knife has a song called the “Twisted Barbie” which the author states that “the song suggests that women can toy with ideals of femininity themselves as artificial (i.e., as unnatural or nonessential) as the Barbie doll” (Wald, 1998). This band has had some success in the US despite the fact that it is an all women Japanese band and that they have had to overcome a lot more than any of the white performers mentioned in this discussion to even get heard. That tells me that girl’s want something different than what they have been getting in the media up until now. Just like my generation embraced Madonna who was willing to go out on the edge, so too are our young girls looking for someone they can relate to.
Comments
I also think you are right when you say that sex has become far more popularized in the media. It used to be that you never saw sex or naked people in movies. But in almost every show and movie these days there is at least one sex scene (whether or not it really has anything to do with the plot of the movie) and we are not shocked by this, it's expected. So I think that your assertion that if the media showed alternative lifestyles (such as homosexual relationships) more frequently and in a more positive light, then eventually, those lifestyles would become less shocking to us. And that could certainly lead to better tolerance.